
Glass, 
Book. 



N 



i 



LECTURES 



ON THE 



ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



BY 



GEOEGE Pf ? MARSH 
it 



FIRST SERIES, 



What! crave ye wine, and have Nilus to drinke of? 

Pesoennics Niger to his Soldiers in Egypt. 
{Old translation.) 



F0UBT3 EDITION. 
EEVISED AND ENLARGED, 



NEW YORK: 
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO., 

654 BROADWAY. 

1877. 



"PE \o-\5 
.M35- 

Copy & 



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In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of 

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PREFACE 



In pursuance of a plan for enlarging the means of 
education afforded by Columbia College in the city of 
New York, courses of instruction, called Post-graduate 
Lectures, were organized in the summer of 1858. I 
was invited by the Trustees of that institution to give 
readings on the English language. The Lectures 
which compose the present volume were prepared and 
delivered in the autumn and winter of 1858-1859, 
and they are printed very nearly in their original 
form. The title " Post-graduate " and the Introduc- 
tory Address sufficiently indicate the class of persons 
for whom they were designed. It was supposed that 
the course might extend through two terms, and the 
plan of the Lectures was arranged accordingly. The 
purpose of the first or introductory series was to excite 



VI PKEFACE. 

aids from the publication of a complete dictionary of 
the English language — a work of prime necessity to 
all the common moral and literary interests of the Brit- 
ish and American people, and which is now in course 
of execution by the London Philological Society, upon 
a plan, and with a command of facilities, that promise 
the most satisfactory results. 

I have only to add, that the occasional allusions 
to the political condition of Europe are to be under- 
stood with reference to the time when the Lectures 
were delivered, and that subsequent events have but 
strengthened the convictions I have expressed on this 
important subject. 

Burlington, Vermont, October 25, 1859. 



PEEFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION. 



In this edition, numerous errors of the copyists 
of my manuscript and of the press, which through 
inexperience in proof-reading I had failed to detect, 
as well as many inadvertences of my own, are cor- 
rected, and the appendix is much enlarged. The 
additions consist principally of citations and proofs 
in illustration of statements and opinions not suffi- 
ciently supported before. 

It is with some reluctance that I have multiplied 
my excerpts and references, because I know that 
though, in a country new to him, the true angler is 
thankful to be told where lie the clear lakelets and 
the fishy brooks, yet he desires no man to catch his 
trout for him. ... 

But the wealth of English literature is such, that 
I need not fear to exhaust its stores by twenty pages 



Vlll PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION. 

of quotation; and lie who patiently explores its 
abundant waters, will not fail to find, that, after all 
that I and other laborers have extracted, there are 
still as good fish in the sea as ever were caught. 

I entitle this volume, First Series, because I am 
about to publish a second, consisting of a course of 
Lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute upon the 
history of the English language, and particularly of 
its lexical and grammatical changes, with special 
reference to its literary capabilities and adaptations. 

Burlington, Vt., January 1, 1861. 



TABLE OP CONTENTS. 



LECTURE L Pa<W 

Introductory ..... 

LECTUEE IL 
Origin of Speech, and of the English Language . 29 

LECTUEE IIL 
Practical Uses of Etymology • 64 

LECTURE IV. 
Foreign helps to the knowledge of English . 76 

LECTURE V. 
Study of Early English ... 97 

LECTURE VI. 
Sources, Composition, and Etymological pioportions of Englisn— ., 117 

LECTURE VII. 
Sources and Composition of English — II . . 150 

LECTURE VIIL 
The Vocabulary of the English Language — I. . 173 

LECTURE IX. 
The Vocabulary of the English Language — LT. 191 

LECTURE X. 
The Vocabulary of the English Language — IIL . 218 

LECTURE XI. 
The Vocabulary cf the English Language — IV. . 238 

LECTURE XII. 
The Vocabulary of the English Language^-V. . . 260 

LECTURE XIII. 
Interjections and Intonations . . . . .281 



X TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

LECTURE XIV. P4.au 

The Noun, the Adjective, and the Verb . . 296 

LECTURE XV. 
Grammatical Inflections — I. . . • • .818 

LECTURE XVL 
Grammatical Inflections — II. . « 840 

LECTURE XVII. 
Grammatical Inflections — III. ... I 860 

LECTURE XVIIL 
Grammatical Inflections — IV. .... 878 

LECTURE XIX. 
English as affected by the Art of Printing — I. . . . 407 

LECTURE XX. 
English as affected by the Art of Printing— II. . . 426 

LECTURE XXL 
English as affected by the Art of Printing — III. • . 444 

LECTURE XXIL 
Orthoepical changes in English .... 468 

LECTURE XXIIL 
Rhyme , . . . . . .499 

LECTURE XXIV. 
Accentuation and Double Rhymes . . • 516 

LECTURE XXV. 
Alliteration, Line-Rhyme, and Assonance . • • • 642 

LECTURE XXVL 
Synonyms . . • • .671 

LECTURE XXVIL 
Principles of Translation .''"••• 696 

LECTURE XXVIIL 
English Bible ...... 617 

LECTURE XXIX 
Corruptions of English . . • 644 

LECTURE XXX. 
The English Language in America • • • 667 



LECTURES 



ON 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 



LECTURE I. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

The severe Roman bestowed upon the language of his 
country the appellation of patrius sermo, the paternal 
or national speech ; but we, deriving from the domesticity 
of Saxon life a truer and tenderer appreciation of the best 
and purest source of linguistic instruction, more happily 
name our home-born English the mother-tongue. The tones 
of the native language are the medium through which the 
affections and the intellect are first addressed, and they are 
to the heart and the head of infancy what the nutriment 
drawn from the maternal breast is to the physical frame. 
" Speech," in the words of Heyse, " is the earliest organic 
act of free self-consciousness, and the sense of our person- 
ality is first developed in the exercise of the faculty of 
speech." Without entering upon the speculations of the 
Nominalists and the Realists, we must admit that, in the 
process of ratiocination, properly called thought, the mind 
acts only by words. "Cogito, ergo sum, I think, there- 



INTRODUCTORY. 



fore I am," said Descartes. Whether this is a logical con- 
clusion or not, we habitually, if not necessarily, connect 
words, thought, and self-recognizing existence, as conditions 
each of both the others, and hence it is that we have little 
or no recollection of that portion of onr life which preceded 
our acquaintance with language Indeed, so necessary are 
words to thought, to reflection, to the memory of former 
states of self-conscious being, that though the intelligence of 
persons born without the sense of hearing sometimes receives, 
through the medium of manual signs, and without instruc- 
tion in words, a very considerable degree of apparent cul- 
ture, yet, when deaf-mutes are educated and taught the use 
of verbal language, they are generally almost wholly unable 
to recall their mental status at earlier periods ; and, so far as 
we are able to judge, they appear to have been previously 
devoid of those conceptions which we acquire, or at least 
retain and express, by means of general terms. So, our 
recollection of moments of intense pain or pleasure, moral 
or physical, is dim and undefined. Grief too big for words, 
joy which finds no articulate voice for utterance, sensations 
too acute for description, when once their cause is removed, 
or when time has abated their keenness, leave traces deep 
indeed in tone, but too shadowy in outline to be capable of 
distinct reproduction ; for that alone which is precisely form- 
ulated can be clearly remembered. 

Nature has made speech the condition and vehicle of 
social intercourse, and consequently it is essentially so ele- 
mentary a discipline, that a thorough knowledge of the 
mother-tongue seems to be presupposed as the basis of all 
education, and especially as an indispensable preparation for 
the reception of academic instruction. It is, doubtless, for 



INTRODUCTORY. 3 

this reason, that, in cur American system of education, the 
study of the English language has usually been almost wholly 
exclu led from the collegial curriculum, and recently, indeed, 
from humbler seminaries, and, therefore, so great a no\elty 
as its abrupt transfer from the nursery to the auditorium of 
a post-graduate course, may seem to demand both explanation 
and apology. 

It is a trite remark, that the national history and the na- 
tional language begin to be studied only in their decay, and 
scholars have sometimes shown an almost superstitious reluc- 
tance to approach either, lest they should contribute to the 
aggravation of a symptom, whose manifestation might tend 
to hasten the catastrophe of which it is the forerunner. In 
deed, if we listen to some of the voices around us, we are in 
danger of being persuaded that the decline of our own tongue 
has not only commenced, but has already advanced too far to 
be averted or even arrested. If it is true, as is intimated 
by the author of our most widely circulated dictionary — a 
dictionary which itself does not explain the vocabulary of 
Paradise Lost — that it is a violation of the present standard of 
good taste to employ old English words not used by Dryden, 
Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper ; if words which enter 
into the phraseology of Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Mil- 
ton, though important " to the antiquary, are useless to the 
great mass of readers ; " and, above all, if the dialect of the 
authoritative standard of the Christian faith, in the purest, 
simplest, and most beautiful form in which it has been pre- 
sented to modem intelligence, is obsolete, unintelligible, for- 
gotten, then, indeed, the English language is decayed, extinct, 
fossilized, and, like other organic relics of the past, a fit sub- 
ject for curious antiquarian research and philosophic investi 
gation, but no longer a theme of living breathing interest. 



4 INTRODUCTORY. 

In reasoning from the past to the present, we are apt 
to forget that Protestant Christianity and the invention of 
printing have entirely changed the outward conditions of at 
least Gothic, not to say civilized, humanity, and so distin 
guished this new phase of Indo-European life from that old 
world which lies behind us, that, though all which was true 
of individual man, in the days of Plato, and of Seneca, and 
of Abelard, is true now, yet most which was conceived to be 
true of man as a created and dependent, or as a social being, 
is at this day recognized as either false or abnormal. The 
reciprocal relations between the means and the ends of hu- 
man life are reversed, and the conscious, deliberate aims and 
voluntary processes and instrumentalities of intellectual ac- 
tion are completely revolutionized. Hence, we are constantly 
in danger of error, when, in the economy of social man, we 
apply ancient theories to modern facts, and deduce present 
effects or predict future consequences from causes which, in 
remote ages, have produced results analogous to recent or 
expected phenomena. This is especially true with reference 
to these studies and those pursuits which are less immedi- 
ately connected with the fleeting interests of the hour. ~We 
are, accordingly, not warranted in concluding that, because 
the creative spirits of ancient and flourishing Hellenic litera- 
ture did not concern themselves with grammatical subtleties, 
but left the syntactical and orthoepical theories of the Greek 
language to be developed in late and degenerate Alexandria, 
therefore the study of native philology in commercial London 
and industrial Manchester proves the decadence of the heroic 
speech, which in former centuries embodied the epic and 
Iramatic glories of English genius. 

The impulse to the study of English, and especially of its 



INTRODUCTORY. 



earlier forms, which has lately begun to be felt in England 
and in this country, is not a result of the action of domestic 
causes. It has not grown out of any thing in the political or 
social condition of the English and American people, or out 
of any morbid habit of the common language and literature 
of both, but it had its origin wholly in the contagion of Con- 
tinental example. The jealousies and alarms of the turbu- 
lent period which followed the first French Revolution, and 
which suspended the independent political existence of so 
many of the minor European States, at the same time threat- 
ening all with ultimate absorption, naturally stimulated the 
self-conscious individuality of every race, and led them alike 
to attach special value to every thing characteristic, every 
thing peculiar, in their own constitution, their own posses 
sions, their own historic recollections, as conservative ele- 
ments, as means of resistance against an influence which 
sought, first, to denationalize, and then to assimilate them 
all to its own social and governmental system. Hence, con 
temporaneously with the wars of that eventful crisis, there 
sprung up a universal spirit of local inquiry, local pride, and 
local patriotism ; the history, the archaeology, the language, 
the early literature, of every European people, became ob- 
jects of earnest study, first with its own scholars, then with 
allied nations or races, and, finally, by the power of interna- 
tional sympathy, and the unexpected light which etymologi- 
cal researches have thrown on some of the most interesting 
questions belonging to present psychology and to past his- 
tory, with enlightened and philosophic thinkers everywhere. 
The people of England were less agitated by the fears 
which disturbed the repose of the Continental nations, and 
ihey are constitutionally slow in yielding either to moral, to 



6 INTRODUCTORY. 

intellectual, or to material influences from without. Accoid 
ingly, while the philologists and historians of Denmark* and 
of Germany were studiously investigating and elucidating 
the course of Anglo-Saxon history, the laws of the Anglo- 
Saxon language, and the character of its literature, as things 
cognate with their own past glories and future aspirations, 
few native English inquirers busied themselves with studies, 
w T hose obscure, though real, connection with the stirring 
events of that epoch no timid sensitiveness had yet taught 
the British mind to feel. It was only when the new politi- 
cal relations between England and the important Germanic 
States had awakened the dormant moral and intellectual 
sympathies between these nations, that the literature and the 
learning of Germany became objects of interest and sources 
of instruction to British scholars. To that period we trace 
the first impulses, whose gradual action has led to the tardy 
revival of national philology in England, and the labors of 
Danish and German linguists form the real groundwork of 
all that native inquirers have since accomplished. 

But although the interest now manifested in the history 
and true linguistic character of the English speech originated 
in external movements, yet it must be admitted that it is, at 
this moment, strengthened in England by a feeling of appre- 
hension concerning the position of that country in coming 

* Thorkelin had prepared the poem of Beowulf for publication as early as 
1807, but the press copy was destroyed in the siege of Copenhagen. He, how- 
ever, renewed his labors, and in 1815, brought out the first edition of that im- 
portant work. Five years later, Grundtvig published a Danish version of Beo- 
wulf, with emendations, in a great measure conjectural, of the original printed by 
Thorkelin. These are among the most successful instances of the application of 
sound learning and critical sagacity to the restoration of corrupt texts. Rask ; 
also a Dane, published in 1817, the first complete Anglo-Saxon grammar, aud 
this has hardly even yet been superseded. 



INTRODUCTORY. I 

years — an apprehension which, in spite of occasional inanifes 
tations of hereditary confidence and pride, is a very widely- 
prevalent sentiment among the British people. Recent oc- 
currences have inspired an anxiety amounting almost to 
alarm, concerning their relations with their nearest, as well as 
their more remote, Continental neighbors, and those who com 
pare the policy and position of England in 1815, 1851, and 
1859, may well be pardoned for some misgivings with regard 
to the present tendencies of the British social and political 
state. In such circumstances, it is natural that enlightened 
Englishmen should cherish a livelier attachment to all that is 
great and reverend in the memories of their early being, and 
thought, and action, and should regard with increasing inter- 
est the monuments that record the series of intellectual and 
physical triumphs by which the Anglo-Saxon and the Nor- 
man raised the Empire they successively conquered to such 
an unexampled pitch of splendor and of power. 

Modern philology, then, did not, like ancient grammatical 
lore, originate in the life-and-death struggle of perishing na- 
tionalities, nor in a morbid consciousness of internal decay 
and approaching dissolution, but in a sound, philosophic ap- 
preciation of the surest safeguard of national independence 
and national honor — an intelligent comprehension, namely, 
of wMat is good and what is great in national history, nation- 
al institutions, national character. It is a pulsation of life, 
not a throe of death ; a token of regeneration, not a sign of 
extinction. The zeal with which these studies are pursued is 
a high expression of intellectual patriotism, a security against 
the perils of absorption and centralization which are again 
menacing the commonwealths of the Eastern Continent, a 
bulwark against the dangers with which what exists of Cod 



INTRODUCTORY. 



tinental liberty is threatened, now by the amoitious dreamg 
of German ' nationality,' now by Muscovite barbarism, and 
now by pontifical obscurantism. 

The fruits of increased attention to domestic philology 
have been strikingly manifested in the reviving literatures, 
and the awakening moral and political energies of many 
lesser European peoples, which, until the agitations I speak 
of, seemed to be fast sinking into forgetfulness and inaction. 
States and races, long deemed insignificant and decrepit, 
have given a new impulse to the intellectual movement of 
our age, and, at the same time, are throwing up new barri- 
cades against the encroachments of the great Continental 
despotisms. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Bohemia, 
Hungary, have roused themselves to the creation of new let- 
ters, and the manifestation of a new popular life. The Eu- 
ropean Continent is to-day protesting against being Teuton- 
ized, as energetically as it did, at the beginning of this cen- 
tury, against a forced conformity to a Gallic organization, 
and we may well hope that the same spirit will be found 
equally potent to resist the Panslavic invasion, which will be 
the next source of danger to the civil and intellectual liberties 
of Christendom. 

There are circumstances in the inherent character of the 
English language which demand — there are circumstances in 
its position which recommend — the most sedulous and perse- 
vering investigation. I will not here speak of what belongs 
to another part of our course — the general value and impor- 
tance of linguistic inquiry — but I will draw your attention to 
the multifarious etymology of our Babylonish vocabulary, 
and the composite structure of our syntax, as peculiarities of 
the English tongue not shared in an equal degree by any 



INTRODUCTORY. * 

other European speech known in literature, and requiring an 
amount of systematic study not in other cases usually neces- 
sary. The groundwork of English, indeed, can be, and best 
is, learned at the domestic fireside — a school for which there 
is no adequate substitute ; but the knowledge there acquired 
is not, as in homogeneous languages, a root, out of which 
will spontaneously grow the flowers and the fruits which 
adorn and enrich the speech of man. English has been 
so much affected by extraneous, alien, and discordant in- 
fluences, so much mixed with foreign ingredients, so much 
overloaded with adventitious appendages, that it is, to most 
of those who speak it, in a considerable degree, a conven- 
tional and arbitrary symbolism. The Anglo-Saxon tongue 
has a craving appetite, and is as rapacious of words, and 
as tolerant of forms, as are its children of territory and of 
religions. But, in spite of its power of assimilation, there is 
much of the speech of England which has never become 
connatural to the Anglican people, and its grammar has pas- 
sively suffered the introduction of many syntactical combina- 
tions, which are not merely irregular, but repugnant. It 
has lost its original organic law of progress, and its present 
growth is by accretion, not by development. I shall not 
here inquire whether this condition of English is an evil. 
There are many cases where a complex and cunningly-devised 
machine, dexterously guided, can do that which the congen- 
ital hand fails to accomplish ; but the computing of our 
losses and gains, the striking of our linguistic balance, be- 
longs elsewhere. Suffice it to say, that English is not a lan- 
guage which teaches itself by mere unreflecting usage. It 
can be mastered, in all its wealth, in all its power, only 
by conscious, persistent labor ; and, therefore, when all the 



10 INTRODUCTORY. 

world is awaking to the value of general philological science, 
it would ill become us to be slow in recognizing the special 
importance of the study of our own tongue.* 

But, in order that this study may commend itself to the 
popular mind, its value and its interest must first be made 
apparent to the thinking spirits by whom the current of 
public opinion is determined. Knowledge has its sources on 
the heights of humanity, and culture derives its authority 
from the example of the acknowledged leaders of society. 
Studies which are neglected or undervalued by the educated 
man, will have still less attraction for the pupil, and English 
philology cannot win its way to a form in American high- 
schools, until it shall have been recognized as a worthy pur- 
suit by the learned and the wise, who are no longer subject 
to the authority of academic teachers. 

But, great as is the practical importance of the knowl- 
edge of words, let it not be said that, for its sake alone, we 
encourage inquiry into the structure and constitution of our 
national speech. The discipline we advocate embraces a 
broader range, and extends itself to the scientific notion of 

* For easie obtaining is enemie to iudgement, not onlie in words and na- 
lurall speche, but in greater matters and verie important. Aduised & con- 
Biderat cumming by, as it proves by those tungs, which we learn by art, where 
time and trauell be the compassing means, emplanteth in wits both certaintie to 
rest on & assurance to rise by. Our natural tung cummeth on vs by hudle, and 
therefor hedelesse, foren language is labored, and therefor learned, the one still 
in vse and neuer well known, the other well known and verie seldom vsed. 
And yet continewal vse should enfer knowledge, in a thing of such vse, as the 
naturall deliurie of our mind and meaning is. And to saie the truth what rea- 
eon is it, to be acquainted abrode and a stranger at home? to know foren tungs 
by rule, and our own but by rote ? If all other men had been so affected, to 
make much of the foren, and set light by their own, as we seme to do, we had 
neuer had these things which we like of so much, we should neuer by compar- 
ing haue discerned the better. — Richard Mulcaster, First Part of the Element* 
arte, 1582, p. 167. 



INTRODUCTORY. 11 

philology, which, though familiar in German literature, has 
not yet become the recognized meaning of the word in Eng 
iish. The course we propose includes, naturally and necessa- 
rily, the study of those old English writers, in whose works 
we find, not only the most forcible forms of expression, but 
a marvellous affluence of the mighty thoughts, out of which 
has grown the action that has made England and her children 
the wonder and the envy of the world. With respect to the 
technicalities of primitive grammar and etymology, the 
radical forms of structure which characterize our ancient 
tongue, the American student has but narrow means of orig- 
inal research. His investigations must, for the present, be 
pursued at second hand, by the aid of materials inadequate 
in themselves, and, too often, collected with little judgment 
or discrimination. The standard of linguistic science in Eng- 
land is, or rather, till recently, has been, comparatively low. 
British scholars have produced few satisfactory discussions 
of Anglo-Saxon or Old-English inflectional or structural forms, 
and it is to Teutonic zeal and learning that we must still look 
for the elucidation of many points of interest connected with 
the form and the signification of primitive English. A large 
proportion of the relics of Anglo-Saxon and of early Eng- 
lish literature remains yet unpublished, or has been edited 
with so little sound learning and critical ability as to serve 
less to guide, than to lead astray. Hence, in the determina- 
tion of ancient texts, we must often accept hasty conjecture, 
or crude opinion, in place of established fact. But a better 
era has commenced. Englishmen have learned from Conti- 
nental linguists to do what native scholarship and industry 
had hitherto failed to accomplish ;* and we may hope that, 

* The recent admirable editions of Layamon, of the Ormulum, and of the 



12 INTRODUCTORY. 

at no distant day, the jet hidden treasures of British philol 
ogy will all be made accessible, and permanently secured fo; 
future study, by means of the art which has been styled 
Ars omnium Artium Conservatrix. 
The general inferiority of English and French to Scandi- 
navian and Teutonic scholars, in philological and especially 
etymological research, is a remarkable, but an indisputable 
fact, and its explanation is not obvious. I can by no meana 
ascribe the difference to an inherent inaptitude on our part 
for such subtle investigations, to a native insensibility to the 
delicate relations between allied sounds and allied significa- 
tions ; but I believe the cause to lie much in the different in- 
tellectual habits which are formed in early life, by the use of 
the respective languages of these nations. The German is 
remarkably homogeneous in its character. An immense pro- 
portion of its vocabulary consists either of simple primitives, 
or of words obviously drawn by composition or derivation 
from radicals still existing in current use as independent vo- 
cables. Its grammatical structure is of great regularity, and 
there are few tongues where the conformity to general rules 
is so universal, and where isolated, unrelated philological facts 

Wycliffite translations of the Scriptures, are exceedingly valuable contributions 
to English philology, and in the highest degree creditable to the critical skill 
and industry of the eminent scholars who have prepared and published them. 
The publications of the various literary societies which occupy themselves with 
old English literature, are of very unequal value, and some of them, certainly, 
both intrinsically worthless, and badly edited. But, in spite of the sneers of 
Garnett, there are few students of our early literature who have not derived 
very important aid from the labors of Halliwell and of Wright. The value of 
Kemble's and Thorpe's contributions to our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon lan- 
guage and literature is too familiar to require special notice ; and I need not 
here speak of the eminent British ethnological and grammatical, or rather lin- 
guistic inquirers of the present day, because this course of lectures is confined 
to quite another field, and I &hall only incidentally have occasion to refer to 
thorn. 



INTRODUCTORY. 13 

are so rare. At the same time, there is enough of grammat- 
ical inflection to familiarize the native speaker with syntacti- 
cal principles imperfectly exemplified in French and English, 
and a sufficiently complex arrangement of the period to call 
into constant exercise the logical faculties required for the 
comprehension and application of the rules of universal 
grammar. While, therefore, I by no means maintain that 
German has any superiority over English for the purposes of 
poetry, of miscellaneous literature, the intercourse of society, 
or the ordinary cares and duties of life, yet as, in itself, an 
intellectual, and especially a linguistic discipline, it has great 
advantages over any of the tongues which embody the gen- 
eral literature of modern Europe. The German boy comes 
out of the nursery scarcely a worse grammarian, and a far 
better etymologist, than the ancient Roman, and is already 
imbued with a philological culture which the Englishman 
and the Frenchman can only acquire by years of painful 
study. Hence we account readily for the comparative ex- 
cellence of the German dictionaries and other helps to the 
full knowledge of the language, while in English, having no 
grammar, we have till lately possessed no grammars, and we 
still want a dictionary. In both English and French, the 
etymology is foreign, or obscured by great changes of form, 
the syntax is arbitrary and conventional, (so far as those 
terms can be applied to any thing in language,) the inflections 
are bald and imperfectly distinguished, and the number of 
solitary exceptional facts, especially in French, is very great. 
When I speak of the poverty of French inflections, I am 
aware I contradict the accidence, which shows a very full 
system of varied terminations ; but the native language is 
learned by the ear, and the spoken tongue of France reduce? 



14 



mTRODUClORT. 



its multitude of written endings to a very small list of artic 
ulated ones. The signs of number and of person, and ofter 
of tense and gender, to which the inflections are restricted 
though well marked in written French, disappear almosi 
wholly in pronunciation, and for those who only speak, the} 
are non-existent.* While, therefore, for speaking French bj 
rote, as natives do all tongues, no grammar is needed, yet few 
written dialects require grammatical aid more imperiously 
while, at the same time, the grammar is of so special a char 
acter as to teach little of general linguistic principle. 

The German philologist, then, begins where the English 
man and the Frenchman leave off — or, rather, at a point tc 
which the great mass of French and English literary mer 
never attain ; and, with such an advantage in the starting 
ground, it would be strange if he did not surpass his rivals. 

The American student shares with the Englishman anc 
the Frenchman in the defect of early grammatical discipline 
and, possessing few large libraries, no collections of rare earlj 
editions, no repositories of original manuscripts, he labors 
under the further inconvenience of a want of access to the 
primitive sources of etymological instruction. For the pres- 
ent, therefore, he must renounce the ambition of adding any 
thing to the existing stores of knowledge respecting English 
philology, and content himself with the humbler and more 
selfish aim of appropriating and elaborating the materia] 
which more fortunate or better trained European scholars 
have gathered or discovered. We must, in the main, study 
English with reference to practical use, rather than to philo- 

* Aimais, aimait, aimaient are identical in sound ; and aimer, aimez, aimai, 
aime, aimes, aimee, and aimees differ so little from the former group, that igno 
rant persons often confound them all in writing, as well as in speaking. 



INTRODUCTORY. 15 

eophic principle ; aim at the positive and the concrete, rathel 
than the absolute and the abstract. And this falls in with 
what is eminently, I will not say happily, the present ten- 
dency of the American mind. "We demand, in all things, an 
appreciable, tangible result, and if a particular knowledge 
caruot be shown to have a value, it is to little purpose to 
recommend its cultivation because of its worth. We must all, 
then, men of action and men of thought, alike, study Eng- 
lish in much the same way, and by the aid of the same in- 
strumentalities — the practical man, because he aims at a 
practical end ; the philosophic thinker, because he is desti- 
tute of the means of approximating to his end by any higher 
method than the imperfect course which alone is open to the 
American scholar. 

There are circumstances which recommend the study of 
English especially to us Americans, others which appeal 
equally to all who use the Anglican speech. Of the former, 
most prominent is the fact that we, in general, require a more 
comprehensive knowledge of our own tongue than any other 
people. Except in mere mechanical matters, and even there 
far more imperfectly, we have adopted the principle of the 
division of labor to a more limited extent than any modern 
civilized nation. Every man is a dabbler, if not a master, 
in every knowledge. Every man is a divine, a statesman, a 
physician, and a lawyer to himself, as well as a counsellor to 
his neighbors, on all the interests involved in the sciences 
appropriately belonging to those professions. We all read 
books, magazines, newspapers, all attend learned lectures, and 
too many of us, indeed, write the one, or deliver the other. 
We resemble the Margites of Homer, who II6XX rjirca-rard 
epya, practised every art, and if, as he tca/cw 8' fiiriaraTZ 



16 INTRODUCTORY. 

wavra, bungled in all, we, too, must fall short of universal 
perfection, we still need, with our multifarious strivings, an 
encyclopedic training, a wide command over the resources of 
our native tongue, and, more or less, a knowledge of all its 
special nomenclatures. But this very fact of the general use 
of the whole English vocabulary among us is a dangerous 
cause of corruption of speech, against which the careful study 
of our language is an important antidote. Things much used 
inevitably become much worn, and it is one of the most 
curious phenomena of language, that words are as subject as 
coin to defacement and abrasion, by brisk circulation. The 
majority of those who speak any tongue incline to speak it 
imperfectly; and where all use the dialect of books, the vehi- 
cle of the profoundest thoughts, the loftiest images, the most 
sacred emotions, that the intellect, the fancy, the heart of 
man has conceived, there special precautions are necessary to 
prevent that medium from becoming debased and vulgarized 
by corruptions of form, or, at least, by association with de- 
praved beings and unworthy themes. "While, therefore, I 
would open to the humble and the unschooled the freest ac- 
cess to all the rich treasures which English literature em- 
bodies, I would inculcate the importance of a careful study 
of genuine English, and a conscientious scrupulosity in its 
accurate use, upon all who in any manner occupy the posi- 
tion of teachers or leaders of the American mind, all whose 
habits, whose tastes, or whose vocations, lead them to speak 
often er than to hear. 

But, as I observed, there are considerations, common to 
the Englishman and the American, which powerfully rec- 
ommend the study of our language to thinking men. One 
of the most important of these is a repetition of the argu- 



INTRODUCTORY. 17 

ment I have just used, but in a more extended application. 
I allude to what, for want of any other equally appropriate 
epithet, I must characterize by a designation much abused 
both by those who rally under it as a watchword of party, 
and by those to whom it is a token of offence — I mean the 
conservatism, of such studies. It is doubted by the ablest 
judges, whether, except in the introduction of new names for 
new things, English has made any solid improvement for 
two centuries and a half, and few are sanguine enough to 
believe that future changes in its structure, or in its vocabu- 
lary, unless in the way just stated, will be changes for the 
better. It is obvious, too, that, in proportion as new gram- 
matical forms, and new designations for familiar things and 
thoughts, are introduced, older ones must grow obsolete, and, 
of course, the existing, and, especially, the earlier literature 
of England, will become gradually less intelligible. The 
importance of a permanent literature, of authoritative stand- 
ards of expression, and, especially, of those great, lasting 
works of the imagination, which, in all highly-cultivated na- 
tions, constitute the " volumes paramount " of their litera- 
ture, has been too generally appreciated to require here argu- 
ment or illustration. Suffice it to say, they are among the 
most potent agencies in the cultivation of the national mind 
and heart, the strongest bond of union in a homogeneous peo- 
ple, the surest holding ground against the shifting currents, 
the ebb and flow, of opinion and of taste. 

The Anglo-Saxon race is fortunate in possessing more 
such volumes paramount than any other modern people. 
The Greeks had their moral and sententious Hesiod ; their 
great tragic trio ; their comic Aristophanes and Menan- 
der ; and, above all, their epic Homer, whose story and whoso 
2 



18 INTRODUCTORY. 

speech were more closely interwoven with the very sonl of 
the whole Hellenic people than was ever other secular com- 
position with the life of man ; the Romans had Ennius, and 
Terence, and Plautus, and, at last, but only when all was 
lost, Horace and Yirgil ; the Italians have Dante, and Pe- 
trarch, and Tasso, and Ariosto ; the Icelanders have Laxdsela, 
the story of Ejall, and the Chronicles of Snorro ; * and we, 
more favored than all, have Chaucer, and Spenser, and 
Shakespeare, and Milton — each, in his own field, as great aa 
the mightiest that ever wielded the pen -in the like kind ; 
and, beyond these, we have the oracles of our faith, stamped 
with the self-approving impress of certain verity, and ren- 
dered, by English pens, in a form of rarer beauty than has 
elsewhere clothed the words of God in the speech of man. 

ISTow, all these books have been for centuries a daily food, 
an intellectual pabulum, that actually has entered into and 
moulded the living thought and action of gifted nations ; 
and, in the case of the Anglican people, it will not be dis- 
puted that, working as they have, all in one direction, their 
great poets have been more powerful than any other secular 
influence in first making, and then keeping, the Englishman 
and the American what they are, what for hundreds of years 
they have been, what, God willing, for thousands they shall 
be, the pioneer race in the march of man towards the highest 
summits of worthy human achievement. 

* Tbe Icelandic sagas, though containing many short rhythmical lays, are not 
metrical, and therefore not poems in the usual sense of the word. But they 
are highly poetical in conception and treatment, and thus unite the fascination 
of more artificial forms of composition with the attractions of authentic history, 
[n the civilization of the Scandinavian people, the prose saga occupied much 
the same place as the metrical epic in the life of the Greeks, or the heroic ballad 
in other modern nations, and it may therefore fairly claim a place in imagin 
ative literature. 



INTRODUCTORY. 19 

The path of national literatures is like the orbit of those 
comets, which long approach the central source of light and 
warmth, and long recede, hut never return to the perihelion, 
and the language of a people has ordinarily but one period 
of culmination. When genius has evolved the best thoughts 
of a given state of society, and elaborated the choicest forms 
of expression of which a given speech is capable, it has an- 
ticipated and appropriated the greatest results of that condi- 
tion of human life, and subsequent literature is but repro- 
ductive, not creative in its character, until some mighty, and, 
for the time, destructive revolution, has dissolved and re-amal- 
gamated the elements of language and of social life in new 
and diverse combinations. 

That the English tongue, and the men who speak it, will 
yet achieve great victories in the field of mind, great works in 
the world of sense, we have ample self-conscious assurance ; 
but, in the existing state of society, it is vain to expect that 
any future literary productions can occupy the place, or exert 
the deep, pervading influence, of the volumes I have named. 
To them, therefore, and to the dialect which is their medium, 
the instinct of self-preservation impels us tenaciously to cling ; 
and when, through our appetite for novelty, our incurious 
neglect of the beautiful and the great, these volumes cease 
to be authorities in language, standards of moral truth and 
sesthetical beauty, and inspiriters of thought and of action, we 
shall have lost the springs of national greatness, which it 
most concerned us to preserve. 

We hear much, in political life, of recurrence to first 
principles, and startling novelties not unfrequently win their 
way to popular acceptance under that disguise. With equal 
truth, and greater sincerity, we may say that, in language 



20 INTRODUCTORY. 

and in literature, nothing can save us from ceaseless revolu- 
tion but a frequent recourse to the primitive authorities and 
the recognized canons of highest perfection. 

In commencing the study of early English, young persons 
are not unfrequently repelled by differences of form, which 
seem to demand a considerable amount of labor to master, 
and the really trifling difficulties of our archaic dialect are 
magnified into insurmountable obstacles. Unhappily, Eng- 
lish scholars, themselves often better instructed in other 
tongues than in their own, have very frequently sanctioned 
the mistake, and encouraged the indolence of contemporary 
readers, by editing modernized editions of good old authors, 
and, in thus clothing them anew, so changed their outward 
aspect, and often their essential character, that the parents 
would scarcely be able to recognize their own progeny. The 
British press has teemed with mutilated and disguised edi- 
tions, while scrupulously faithful reprints of early English 
works have, until lately, not been often attempted, or ever 
well encouraged. As a general rule, in the printing of old 
manuscripts, and the republication of works which genius 
and time have sealed with the stamp of authority, no change 
whatever, except the correction of obvious clerical or typo- 
graphical errors, should be tolerated ; and even this should 
be ventured on only with extreme caution, because it often 
turns out that what is hastily assumed to have been a mis- 
spelling or a misprint, is, in fact, a form deliberately adopted 
by a writer better able to judge what was the true orthogra- 
phy for the time, than any later scholar can be. 

The rule of Coleridge has nowhere a juster application 
than here : That, when we meet an apparent error in a good 
author, we are to presume ourselves 6 ignorant of his under- 



INTRODUCTORY. 21 

standing, until we are certain that we nuclei stand his igno- 
rance. " The number of scholars who are so thoroughly pos- 
sessed of the English of the sixteenth, not to mention earlier 
centuries, as to be safely intrusted with the correction of 
authors of that period, is exceedingly small, and I doubt 
whether it would be possible to cite a single instance where 
this has been attempted, without grievous error, while, in 
most cases, the book has been not merely lessened in value, 
but rendered worse than useless for all the purposes of phi- 
lology and true literature. 

But for the unfortunate readiness with which editors and 
publishers have yielded to the popular demand for conformity 
to the spelling and the vocabulary of the day, the knowledge 
of genuine English would now be both more general and 
further advanced than it is. The habit of reading books as 
they were written would have kept up the comprehension, if 
not the use, of good old forms and choice words which have 
irrecoverably perished, and the English of the most vigorous 
period of our literature would not now be sneered at as obso- 
lete and unintelligible. 

After all, the difficulties of acquiring a familiar acquaint- 
ance with the dialect of the reign of Edward III. are ex- 
tremely small. Let not the student be discouraged by an 
antiquated orthography,* or, now and then, a forgotten word, 
and a month's study will enable him to read, with entire 
readiness and pleasure, all that the genius of England has 

* The irregularity of the spelling in early English books is very frequently 
chargeable almost wholly to the printer. The original manuscript of the Ormu- 
lum is nearly as uniform in its orthography as the most systematic modern 
writers, and some of the codices on which Pauli's edition of Gower is founded 
are described as scarcely less consistent in their spelling. — See pott, Lecturea 
ix. and xxi. 



22 INTRODUCTORY. 

produced during the five centuries that ha~e elapsed since 
English literature can be said to have had a being. 

I cannot, of course, here dilate upon the value of a famil- 
iarity with the earlier English writers, but I may, perhaps, 
be indulged in a momentary reference to the greatest of them, 
the perusal of whose works alone would much more than 
compensate the little labor required to understand the dialect 
in which they are written. Neither the prose nor the verse 
of the English literature of the fourteenth century comes up 
to the elaborate elegance and the classic finish of Boccaccio 
and of Petrarch. But, in original power, and in all the high- 
est qualities of poetry, no Continental writer of that period, 
with the single exception of Dante, can, for a moment, be 
compared with Chaucer, who, only less than Shakespeare, 
deserves the epithet, myriad-minded, so happily applied by 
Coleridge to the great dramatist. He is eminently the crea- 
tor of our literary dialect, the introducer, if not the inventor, 
of some of our finest poetical forms, and so essential were his 
labors in the founding of our national literature, that, with- 
out Chaucer, the seventeenth century could have produced 
no Milton, the nineteenth no Keats.* It is from defect of 

* I must here, once for all, make the sad concession, that many of Chaucer's 
works are disfigured, stained, polluted, by a grossness of thought and of Ian* 
guage which strangely and painfully contrasts with the delicacy, refinement, and 
moral elevation of his other productions. The only apology, or rather pallia- 
tion of this offence, is that which serves to excuse similar transgressions in 
Shakespeare ; namely, that the thoughts, the images, the words, are such as be- 
long to the character presented, or for the time assumed, by the poet; and we 
must remember that the moral and religious degradation of the fourteenth waa 
far deeper and more pervading than that of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
turies. 

I am not ignorant that Chaucer's poems are in great part translations, para* 
phrases, or imitations. But this was the habit of the time. Every man built 
on the foundation of his predecessors, and Chaucer, while he touched nothing 
which he did not improve, is alway3 best when he is most original in the concep* 



INTRODUCTORY. 23 

knowledge alone, that his diction and Lis versification have 
been condemned as rude and unpolished. There are, indeed, 
Borne difficulties in his prosody, which have not yet been fully 
solved ; hut these will, doubtless, chiefly yield to a more crit- 
ical revision of the text, and even with the corrupt reading 
of the old printed editions, the general flow of his verse is 
.scarcely inferior to the melody of Spenser. There can be 
little doubt that his metrical system was in perfect accordance 
with the orthoepy of his age, and it was near two centuries 
before any improvements were made upon his diction or his 
numbers. 

I remarked that there are circumstances in the position 
and the external relations of the English language, which 
recommend its earnest study and cultivation. I refer, of 
course, to the commanding political influence, the wide- 
spread territory, and the commercial importance of the two 

tion as well as the treatment of his theme. There is no doubt a strong resem- 
blance between the general diction of this poet and of Gower. The etymological 
proportions of their vocabularies are not widely different, nor are the grammat- 
ical discordances between them very great. But in the choice of words us de- 
termined by subject, in metrical construction, in poetic coloring, in compass, 
variety, beauty, and appositeness of illustration, in dramatic power, in nice per- 
ception of character, and in justness of thought, the superiority of Chaucer is 
almost .mmeasurable. A reader who should note the passages in his works, 
which, in point of thought or expression, are particularly suited to serve as 
effective quotations, would find on reviewing his list, that no English writer ex- 
cept Shakespeare, has uttered so many striking and pithy sentences as Chaucer. 

Few of his greater qualities were inherited by his immediate successors. The 
influence of his style is perceptible enough in the poetic diction of all after 
ges ; but it is strange that the following century should have given birth to 
almost nothing better than what, in spite of the ingenious arguments of Skelton's 
defenders, I must still characterize as the wretched ribaldry of that author. 
In speaking of the relations of Chaucer to the author of Paradise Lost, I, of 
course, refer to language only, and especially to the diction of the minor poems 
of Milton, which are as important in any just view of his poetical character as 
his great epic itself. Keats, both in verbal form and in the higher qualities of 
poetry, is constantly reminding us of the more imaginative works of Chaucer. 



24 INTRODUCTORY. 

great motlier-coun tries whose vernacular it is. Although 
England is no longer at the head of the European political 
system, yet she is still the leading influence in the sphere of 
commerce, of industry, of progressive civilization, and of 
enlightened Christian philanthropy. 

The British capital is at the geographical centre of the 
terrestrious portion of the globe, and while other great cities 
represent individual nationalities, or restricted and temporary 
aims, the lasting, cardinal interests of universal humanity 
have their brightest point of radiation in the city of London. 

The language of England is spoken by greater numbers 
than any other Christian speech, and it is remarkable that, 
while some contemporaneous dialects and races are decaying 
and gradually disappearing from their natal soil, the English 
speech and the descendants of those who first employed it 
are making hourly conquests of new territory, and have al- 
ready established their posts within hailing distance through- 
out the circuit of the habitable globe. The English language 
is the special organ of all the great, world-wide charities 
which so honorably distinguish the present from all preced- 
ing ages. "With little of the speculative universal philan- 
thropy which has been so loudly preached and so little 
practised elsewhere, the English people have been foremost 
in every scheme of active benevolence, and they have been 
worthily seconded by their American brethren. The English 
Bible has been scattered by hundreds of millions over the 
face of the earth, and English-speaking missionaries have 
planted their maternal dialect at scores of important points, 
to which, had not their courageous and self-devoting energy 
paved the way, not even the enterprise of trade could have 
opened a path. Hence, English is emphatically the language 



INTRODUCTORY. 25 

of commerce, of civilization, of social and religions freedom, 
of progressive intelligence, and of active catholic philanthro- 
py ; and, therefore, beyond any tongue ever used by man, 
it is of right the cosmopolite speech. 

That it will ever become, as some dream, literally univer- 
sal in its empire, I am, indeed, far from believing ; nor do I 
suppose that the period will ever arrive, when our many-sided 
humanity will content itself with a single tongue. In the 
incessant change which all language necessarily undergoes, 
English itself will have ceased to exist, in a form identifia- 
ble with its present character, long before even the half of 
the human family can be so far harmonized and assimilated 
as to employ one common medium of intercourse. Lan- 
guages adhere so tenaciously to their native soil, that, in 
general, they can be eradicated only by the extirpation of 
the races that speak them. To take a striking instance : the 
Celtic has less vitality, less power of resistance, than any 
other speech accessible to philological research. In its whole 
known history it has made no conquests, and it has been ever 
in a waning condition, and yet, comparatively feeble as is its 
self-sustaining power, two thousand years of .Roman and Teu- 
tonic triumphs have not stifled its accents in England or in 
Gaul. It has died only with its dying race, and centuries 
may yet elapse before Engb'sh shall be the sole speech of 
Britain itself. 

In like manner, not to notice other sporadic ancient dia- 
lects, the primitive language of Spain, after a struggle of 
two and twenty centuries with Phoenicians, and Celts, and 
Carthaginians, and Romans, and Goths, and Arabs, is still 
the daily speech of half a million of people. If, then, such 
be the persistence of language, how can we look forward to 



26 INTRODUCTORY. 

a period wlien English shall have vanquished ai d superseded 
the Chinese and the Tartar dialects, the many tongues of 
polyglot India, the yet surviving Semitic speeches, in their 
wide diffusion, and the numerous and powerful Indo-Eu- 
ropean languages, which are even now disputing with it the 
mastery % In short, the prospect of the final triumph of any 
jme tongue is as distant, as improbable, I may add, as unde- 
sirable, as the subjection of universal man to one monarchy, 
or the conformity of his multitudinous races to one standard 
of color, one physical type. The Author of our being has 
implanted in us our discrepant tendencies, for wise pur- 
poses, and they are, indeed, a part of the law of life itself. 
Diversity of growth is a condition of organic existence, and 
so long as man possesses powers of spontaneous development 
and action, so long as he is more and better than a machine, 
so long he will continue to manifest outward and inward dif- 
ferences, unlikeness of form, antagonisms of opinion, and 
varieties of speech. But yet, though English will not super- 
sede, still less extirpate, the thousand languages now spoken, 
it is not unreasonable to expect for it a wider diffusion, a 
more commanding inlluence, a more universally acknowl- 
edged beneficent action, than has yet been reached, or can 
hereafter be acquired, by any ancient or now existent tongue, 
and we may hope that the great names which adorn it will 
enjoy a wider and more durable renown than any others of 
the sons of men. 

These brief remarks do but hint the importance of the 
studies I am advocating, and it will be the leading object of 
my future discourses more fully to expound their claims, and 
to point out the best method of pursuing them. 

A series of lessons upon the technicalities of English phi- 



INTRODUCTORY. 27 

lology would, it is thought, be premature ; and, moreover, 
adequate time and means for the execution of an undertak 
ing, involving so vast an amount of toil, have not yet been 
given. That must be the work, if not of another laborer, at 
least of other years, and our present readings must be re- 
garded only as a collection of miscellaneous observations 
upon the principles of articulate language, as exemplified in 
the phonology, vocabulary, and syntax of English ; or, in 
other words, as a course preparatory to a course of lectures 
on the English tongue. Such as I describe the course, too, I 
shall endeavor to make each individual lecture, namely, a 
somewhat informal presentation of some one or more philo- 
logical laws, or general facts, in their connection with the 
essential character, or historical fortunes, of our own speech. 

The lectures are, under the circumstances, essentially an 
experiment, the character and tastes of the small audiences I 
was encouraged to expect, uncertain ; but the necessities of 
the case have decided the character of the series for me, and, 
as in many other instances where external conditions control 
our action, in a way which my own judgment would proba- 
bly have approved. 

The preparation of a series of thoroughly scientific dis- 
courses upon the English tongue, within the time and with 
the means at my command, was impossible ; and I therefore 
adopted the plan I have described, as the only practicable 
course, and, not improbably, also the best. This point being 
disposed of, there remained only the embarrassment arising 
from the uncertainty of the amount of philological attain- 
ment generally possessed by my audience. I have thought 
myself authorized to presume that, however small in num- 
ber, it would embrace persons somewhat widely separated in 



28 INTRODUCTORY. 

degree of culture, and as I desire to make my discourses, so 
far as it lies in my power, acceptable, if not instructive, to 
all, I shall ask the scholar sometimes to pardon familiar, even 
trite statements of principle, illustrations which can scarcely 
claim to be otherwise than trivial, and repetitions which 
clearness and strength of impression may render necessary 
for some, while I shall hope the less advanced will excuse me 
when I indulge in speculations designed for those to whom 
long study has rendered recondite doctrine more intelligible. 
In the main, I shall address you as persons of liberal culture, 
prepared, by general philological education, to comprehend 
linguistic illustrations drawn from all not widely remote and 
unfamiliar sources, but who, from unexcited curiosity, or the 
superior attractions and supposed claims of other knowledges, 
have not made the English language a matter of particular 
study, thought, or observation ; and such I shall hope to con- 
vince that the subject is possessed of sufficient worth and 
sufficient interest to deserve increased attention, as a branch 
Df American education. 



LECTURE II. 

ORIGIN OF SPEECH AND OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Although, for the reasons assigned in the introductory 
lecture, the plan I propose to pursue does not conform to 
philosophic method, it will not be amiss to follow the exam- 
ple of more scientific speakers, by prefacing these lessons with 
a formal announcement of the subject to be discussed, and a 
definition of the terms of art employed in propounding it. 

The course upon which we are now about to enter has 
for its subject the English Language, the mother-tongue of 
most, and the habitual speech of all, to whom these lectures 
are addressed. It may seem that the adjective English, and 
the noun language, are so familiar to the audience, and so 
clearly and distinctly defined in their general use, that no 
inquiry into their history can make their meaning plainer. 
But our business is with words, and it will not be superflu- 
ous to examine into the origin and grounds of the signification 
ascribed even to terms so well understood as those which 
express the subject of our discourse. 

Neither the epithet nor the substantive is of indigenous 
growth. The word language is derived, through the French, 



30 LANGUAGE, ESSENTIAL CHARACTER OF 

from the Latin lingua, the tongue, a name very commonly 
applied to speech, because the tongue, from its relative bulk, 
its flexibility, and the greater power of the voluntary muscles 
over it, is the most conspicuous, if not the most important 
organ concerned in the production of articulate sounds. The 
Anglo-Saxons had several words for language, as g e r e o r d, 
g e £> e o d e , lyden, reord, spell, spsec, sprsec, 
J>eodisc, tunge. Some of these cannot be traced back 
to any more radical form ; and we therefore cannot positively 
say, as we can of the corresponding words in most other 
tongues, that they are of a figurative character. Lyden is 
recognizable in our modern English adjective loud, and 
Chaucer, and other early writers, use leden for language ; 
s p se c , in speech / t u n g e , in tongue ; and spell still sub- 
sists in the noun spell, a charm, the verb to spell, and as the 
last member of gospel.* 



* It is not clear whether the first syllable of this word is the name of the 
divinity, God, or the adjective god, good. Bosworth (under God) and many 
other etymologists, adopt the former supposition; and this view is supported 
by the analogy of the Icelandic, which has gudspjAll, God's word. On the 
other hand god-spell, as a compound of the adjective god and spell would 
be the exact etymological equivalent of the Greek ivayyeXtov, and the author of 
the Ormulum, who lived at a period when Anglo-Saxon was not yet forgotten, 
evidently adopts this derivation. 

Goddspell onn Ennglissh nemmnedd iss 
God word, annd god tipennde, 

God errnde, &c. Ormulum, Preface, 157. 

And again, 

Off all biss god uss brinngeb word 
Annd errnde annd god tifpinnde 
Goddspell, and forrpi magg itt well 
God errnde ben gehatenn, &c, &c. 

Ormulum, Preface, 1*75. 
Layamon, iii. 182, v. 29508, has 

& beode per godes godd-spel ; 

and preach there God's gospel, a phrase not likely to be employed if gospel had 
been understood to mean, of itself, God's word. See Appendix, 2. 



ORIGIN OF SPEECH. 31 

The word language, in its most limited application, is 
restricted to human articulate speech ; but in its metaphor- 
ical use, it embraces every mode of communication by which 
facts can be made known, sentiments or passions expressed, 
or emotions excited. We speak not only of the audible lan- 
guage of words, the visible language of written alphabetic 
characters, or other conventional symbols, whether arbitrary 
or imitative, the dumb and indefinable language of manual 
signs, of facial expression and of gesture, but of the languago 
of brute beast and bird ; and we apply the same designation 
to the promptings of the silent inspiration, and the lessons of 
the intelligible providence, of the Deity, as well as to the 
voice of the many-tongued operations of inanimate nature. 
Language, therefore, hi its broadest sense, addresses itself to 
the human soul both by direct intuition, and through all the 
material entrances of knowledge. Every organ may be its 
vehicle, every sense its recipient, and every form of existence 
a speaker. 

Many men pass through life without pausing to inquire 
whether the power of speech, of which they make hourly 
usage, is a faculty or an art — a gift of the Creator, or a pain- 
fully-acquired accomplishment — a natural and universal pos- 
session, or a human invention for carrying on the intercom 
munication essential to social life.* We may answer this 

* A similar questiou has been raised with regard to the cries of animals, 
which, for certain purposes at least, perform the office of speech. About the 
beginning of this century, Daines Barrington, a member of the Royal Society, 
tried a series of experiments to determine how far the notes of birds were spon- 
taneous and uniform, and how far dependent on instruction and imitation. The 
result, (which, however, has been questioned by later observers,) was that 
though there is much difference in flexibility, power, and compass of voice in 
Dirds of different species, yet, in general, the note of the bird is that which he 
is taught in the nest, and with more or less felicity of imitation, he adopts tho 



32 ORIGIN OF SPEECH. 

query, in a general way, by saying that the use of articulate 
language is a faculty inherent in man, though we cannot 
often detect any natural and necessary connection between -a 
particular object and the vocal sound by which this or that 
people represents it. There can be little doubt that a colony 
of children, reared without hearing words uttered by those 
around them, would at length form for themselves a speech. 
What its character would be could only be determined by the 
method of Psammetichus, an experiment too cruel to be re- 
peated by inquirers intelligent enough to be interested in the 
result. It is not improbable that a language of manual signs 
would precede articulate words, and it may be presumed that 
these signs would closely resemble those so much used as a 
means of communication among savages, arid which are, to 
a great extent, identical with what have been called the nat- 

song of his nurse, whether the maternal bird or a stranger. To what extent 
the notes of birds, of beasts, of insects, and offish, (for, in spite of the proverb, 
all fishes are not dumb,) are significant, it is quite out of our power to deter, 
mine. Coleridge, tenaciously as he adheres to the essential distinction in kind 
between the faculties of the brute and the man, admits that the dog may have 
an analogon of words. (Aids, Aph. ix.) 

All will agree in denying to the lower animals the possession of language as 
a means of intellectual discourse ; but even this conclusion must rest upon 
stronger grounds than the testimony of the ear. Sounds, which to our obtuse 
organs appear identical, may be infinitely diversified to the acuter senses of 
these inferior creatures, and there is abundant evidence that they do in many 
instances communicate with each other by means, and in a degree, wholly in- 
appreciable by us. When a whale is struck, the whole shoal, though widely dis- 
persed, are instantly made aware of the presence of an enemy ; and when the 
gravedigger beetle finds the carcass of a mole, he hastens to communicate the 
discovery to his fellows, and soon returns with his four confederates. (Con- 
science, Boek der Natuer vi.) The distinction we habitually make between ar- 
ticulate and inarticulate sounds, though sufficiently warranted as applied to 
human utterance, may be unfounded with reference to voices addressed to or- 
ganizations less gross ; and a wider acquaintance with human language often 
teaches us that what to the ear is, at first, a confused and inexpressive mutter- 
ing, becomes, by some familiarity, an intelligible succession of significant 
Bounds. 



SIGN-LANGUAGE. 



nral signs of the deaf-and-dumb. If yon bring together two 
uneducated but intelligent deaf-mutes from different coun- 
tries, they will at once comprehend most of each other's 
signs, and converse with freedom, while their respective 
speaking countrymen would be wholly unable to communi- 
cate at all. And it is often observed at deaf-and-dumb asy- 
lums, when visited by natives of Polynesia, or American 
Indians, that the pupils and the strangers very readily un- 
derstand each other, nature suggesting the same symbols to 
both. Thus, the savage and the deaf-mute alike express the 
notion of parity in general, and especially the fraternal rela- 
tion, by joining and extending the two fore-fingers. The all- 
observing Shakespeare must have remembered this, when he 
made Fluellen say, " As like as my fingers is to my fingers." * 
In this instance, as also when the savage and the deaf-mute 
both express the speaking of truth by passing the extended 
index directly forwards from the lips, and the utterance of 
falsehood by carrying it crookedly sidewise, there seems to be 
some natural analogy between the gesture and the thought. 
So the coincidence, by which they agree in moving the hand 
with a rapid circular or spiral motion over the top of the 
head to indicate a fool, though less familiar, is equally expli- 
cable ; but there are signs common to the savage and the deaf- 
mute, or at least mutually intelligible to them, which are 
apparently arbitrary, and without any discoverable relation 
to the tiling signified. 

Trained, as we are, to a grave and unimpassioned maimer, 
it is difficult for us to realize that the movements and gestures 



* I rcmemoer that when I told a Turcoman, in reply to a question whether 
I was an Englishman, that I was an American, he expressed his notion of the 
Identity of the two peoples by the same sign. See App. 3. 
2 



34: SIGN-LANGUAGE. 

with which Italian vivacity accompanies its social intercourse, 
are all really significant. But, though in the cultivated circles 
of Italy, and other countries of Southern Europe, manual signs 
are less resorted to, yet telegraphic communications by hands, 
face, feet, the whole person, in short, are everywhere kept up, 
as qu alifications of animated oral discourse. A foreigner, there- 
fore, who understands no language but that addressed to the 
ear, loses much of the point of the lively conversation around 
him. Among the lower classes in the Mediterranean countries, 
the use of signs, with or without words, is very general. If you 
ask an Italian servant, who has returned empty-handed from 
the Post-Office, whether he has letters for you, he will reply 
by moving his uplifted fore-finger slowly backwards and for- 
wards before his nose ; while a Greek, under similar circum- 
stances, would throw back the head, elongate the face, roll 
up the eyes, and give a cluck with the tongue, not unlike the 
note of a setting hen. You see the coachmen, servants, and 
others of the lower classes in Italy, constantly communicating 
by signs, sometimes, indeed, throwing in a word, but often 
expressing a whole sentence in a silent gesture ; and in con- 
versation, especially on subjects where caution is necessary, a 
speaker will often stop in the middle of a period, and finish 
his remarks in dumb pantomime. Italian scholars have 
shown that the sign-language of modern, is very closely anal- 
ogous to that of ancient Italy, to which the classical writers 
often allude, and its origin dates back very far into the night 
of time. In an artistic point of view, a knowledge of these 
signs is of considerable interest, for it serves to interpret 
much of the action in the pictorial compositions of Italian 
masters which would be otherwise hardly intelligible.'* Be- 

* The language of gesture is so well understood in Italy, that when King 



SIGN-LANGUAGE. 35 

sides articulate sounds and the language of signs, we have 
another means by which we often, involuntarily and uncon- 
sciously, communicate, or rather betray, if not facts, at least 
the state of our own minds, our thoughts and feelings, 
prompted by known or supposed facts. I refer here to the 
spontaneous action of the muscles of the face, and sometimes 
of the whole frame, when we are excited by powerful emo- 
tions, or are specially interested in the topic of a conversation 
which we hear or participate in. That much practice may 
enable any one to control, in a great degree, this involuntary 
expression, is undoubtedly true ; but an acute observer of 
the human face can, in very many cases, read what is passing 
in the breast of another, in spite of the most strenuous efforts 
to conceal it. So much more truth-telling than words, in fact, 
are these self-speaking muscles to those who have studied 
their dialect, that it is a current adage, that language was 
given us to enable us to conceal our thoughts. 

Ferdinand returned to Naples after the revolutionary movements of 1822, he 
made an address to the lazzaroni from the balcony of the palace, wholly by 
signs, which, in the midst of the most tumultuous shouts, were perfectly intelli- 
gible to his public. He reproached, threatened, admonished, forgave, and final- 
ly dismissed the rabble as thoroughly persuaded and edified by the gesticulations 
of the royal Punch, as an American crowd by the eloquence of a Webster. The 
svstem of semeiology, if I may coin a word for the occasion, is even more per- 
fected in Sicily, and it is traditionally affirmed that the famous conspiracy of the 
Sicilian Vespers was organized wholly by facial signs, not even the hand being 
employed. The general use of signs in Italy has grown, in a great measure, out 
of the fact that their swift expressiveness is often better suited to the rapid com- 
munication required by an impassioned people than the slow movement of ar- 
ticulate phrase. But there is another reason for the employment of a sign-lan- 
guage in the States of the Church, in Naples, and other despotic countries. 
Every man knows that he is constantly surrounded by spies, and it is therefore 
safer to express himself by gestures, whose application is unintelligible to a lia» 
tener not already acquainted with the subject to which they refer, and which, 
Decides, cannot be so readily recorded or repeated, even when understood. 



36 IMITATIVE WORDS. 

There is a familiar class of words called imitative, or, to 
use a hard term, onomatopoetic, where there is an evident 
connection between the sound and the sense. These are all, 
or nearly all, words descriptive of particular sounds, or acts 
accompanied by characteristic sounds, such as buzz, crash, 
gurgle, gargle, hum, whiz, coo, howl, bellow, roar, whistle, 
whine, creak, cluck, gabble; and, in conversation, we often 
allow ourselves to use words of this class not to be found in 
the largest dictionaries. The remark of a contemporary of 
Dr. Johnson, that much of the effect of his conversation was 
owing to his " how-wow way," will be remembered by every 
one. A great modern English poet, following the authority 
of Sidney, has even introduced into verse a word borrowed 
from the voice of the sheep, when, speaking of certain censur- 
able follies, he calls them " baaing vanities." That these 
resemblances are in many instances imaginary, apj>ears from 
the fact that different nations sometimes express the same 
sound by different imitative words. Thus, we represent the 
report of fire-arms by the word dang ! the Germans by puff, 
or p af f ! ; and Sylvester, in his translation of Du Bartas pub- 
lished two centuries and a half since, uses pork, pork, instead 
of the modern caw, caw, as an imitation of the note of the 
raven.* 



* A passage, cited by Suidas from Cratinus, imitating the bleating of sheep, 
has been appealed to as a proof that the pronunciation of the modern Greeks is 
erroneous, because according to their orthoepy, the syllables in question 
would be sounded not ba, 6a, but ve, ve. On the other hand, it might be ob- 
served, that perhaps the Grecian sheep in the time of Cratinus were of breedsf 
whose bleat was as distinct from that of the modern European stock, as the 
croaking of what Tassoni calls the " syrens of the ditch," in Western Europe f 
is from that of their aquatic brethren of Athens, whose song, as every observing 
traveller in Greece can testify, the jSpe^/cc/ce^ ko<x% /coo{ of the Aristophanic 
»omedy so well represents. 



ORIGIN OF SPEECH. 31 

There has been much ingenious and plausible speculation 
upon the natural significance of articulate words ; and it is 
at least established, that certain elementary sounds are very 
extensively, if not universally, employed to express certain 
primary conceptions. The subject has not, however, yet been 
prosecuted far enough to bring us to very precise results ; 
but we are probably authorized to say that, as a general law, 
there does exist, or has existed, a natural connection between 
the sound and the thing signified, and consequently, that 
the forms of language are neither arbitrary or conventional 
on the one hand, nor accidental on the other, but are natural 
and necessary products of the organization, faculties, and 
condition of man. Nay, some philologists maintain that the 
laws of the germination and growth of these forms are so 
constant, that if the structure and powers of the organs of 
speech, and all modifying outward conditions affecting the 
internal or external life of a particular race, could be pre- 
cisely known, their entire language might be predicted and 
constructed beforehand, with as much certainty as any other 
result of the action of human faculties. Hence it would fol- 
low that a resemblance between particular radicals or gram- 
matical forms in different languages does not prove that one 
is derived from the other, or that both are historically refer- 
able to any one original source ; but the likeness may be 
simply an instance of a similarity of effect from the operation 
of similar causes. It would therefore, be conceivable that 
words identical in form, yet absolutely new, might even now 
spring up simultaneously or successively in nations between 
which there is no communication, and no connection but that 
which is implied in unity of species and of organization. 
When, therefore, we find in the language of the Tonga Isl- 



38 ORIGIN OF SPEECH. 

ands the verb mate, to kill, we are not authorized to infei 
an affinity between that speech and the Spanish, which uses 
m a t a r in the same sense, or the Latin which has m a c t a r e. 
also of the like signification. "We must either refer such 
cases to some obscure law of universal humanity, or agree 
with an old writer, who remarks that 

" The judicious behold these as no regular congruities, but 
casual coincidences, the like to which may be found in lan- 
guages of the greatest distance, which never met together 
since they parted at the confusion of Babel ; and we may 
not enforce a conformity between the Hebrew and the Eng- 
lish because one of the three giants, sons of Anak, was called 
A.-hi-manP 

The origin of language is shrouded in the same impen- 
etrable mystery that conceals the secrets of our primary 
mental and physical being. "We cannot say, with some, that 
it is of itself an organism, but we regard it as a necessary, 
and, therefore, natural, product of intelligent self-conscious 
organization. Yet we do not believe that the rage of the 
naturalistic school of philosophy for detecting law and prin- 
ciple, where our limited human faculties must be content to 
accept ultimate fact, will ever succeed in pointing out the 
quo modo, the how, of its germination and early development. 
We know no language in a state of formation. So far as ob- 
servation goes, its structure is as complete among the most un- 
lettered savages, and in the remotest periods, as in the golden 
age of Hellenic literature. The history of its changes we 
can but imperfectly trace ; the law of its being lies beyond 
our reach. Its contemporary mutations, even, elude us, and 
to most of our inquiries into the rationale of its forms we find 
no more satisfactory answer than that one given by the quaint 



ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 3& 

author of the Keligio Medici, in the seventh of his Miscel- 
lany Tracts, 

Why saith the Italian, Signor, si! the Spaniard, Si SeiJor! 
Because the one puts that behind, the other puts before. 

But though the faculty of articulate speech may be con- 
sidered natural to man, it differs from most other human 
powers, whether organic or incorporeal, in this : that it is a 
faculty belonging to the race, not to the individual, and that 
the social condition is essential, not to its cultivation, but to 
its existence. Hence, its exercise is not spontaneous, or in 
any sense self-taught, as are all purely organic processes. 
Nevertheless, considered in its mode of action, the use of the 
mother-tongue may be regarded as an instinctive function, 
because it is acquired through the promptings of natural im- 
pulses, and without any conscious, calculating effort. We 
retain no recollection of the process by which we learned to 
understand and employ our maternal speech, at least as re- 
spects that portion of it which is mastered in infant life, and 
not taught in the artificial form it assumes in books. In 
actual speaking, the movement, both physical and intellec- 
tual, is as completely automatic and unconscious as the action 
of the nerves, muscles, and tendons, by whose instrumentality 
the hand is raised or the foot thrown forward. We will the 
result, and it follows, mechanically in both cases, so far as 
any conscious operation of our volition upon the material 
agencies is concerned. It is, therefore, no abuse of words to 
call the mother-tongue, as the unlearned often do, our natural 
language. 

Speech, fully possessed and absolutely appropriated, is 
purely subjective, but it becomes inorganic and foreign when 
we make it matter of objective study, observation, or con* 



4:0 MOTHER-TONGUE. 

scious effort. Learning a foreign language, or even studi 
ously conforming our own to abstract rule, is analogous to 
those half-intellectual, half-corporeal processes, by which we 
acquire the power of controlling the action of the involun- 
tary muscles, so as to give movement to parts of the system 
ordinarily quiescent ; and speech, like bodily motion, is sel- 
dom graceful or free, except while its action is spontaneous. 
The moment it betrays itself as artificial, it becomes con- 
strained, awkward, inelegant. And hence it is that the 
mother-tongue, though it may be forgotten, can never be 
completely supplanted or supplied by any other. Those who 
grow up speaking many languages, very seldom acquire a 
complete mastery over any of them. They are linguistic 
orphans, without a maternal speech, and they use language 
not as an organ, but as an implement.* 

* It is wonderful to what extent purely conventional articulate symbols* may 
be made to supply the place of a more natural language, and to serve as a 
means of very varied communication. In most of these cases, the signs agreed 
upon must be considered as standing for words, not ideas, and they are rather 
an index to speech than a language of themselves. Take the exhibitions often 
witnessed, where, when you show an object to one in the secret, a confederate, 
blindfolded or in an adjoining room, will instantly name it. A method of com- 
munication in such cases is this. The parties agree to designate certain words 
of frequent occurrence, chiefly names of familiar objects, by numerals, and the 
table of words and their corresponding numbers is committed to memory by 
both. The simple digits up to nine, including also the cipher, will represent 
words which may, without exciting suspicion, be used in asking the name of the 
object. Let us suppose 1 to stand for what, 2 for is, and 3 for this ; and further, 
that the number corresponding to pen-knife is 123. The performer, when a 
spectator produces a pen-knife, asks, What is this ? The confederate combines 
the corresponding numerals one, two, three, into the number 123, the answer to 
which is pen-knife. Or again, 4, 5, and 6 may stand respectively for tell, me, and 
now, and the number 645 for pencil. A pencil is held up by a spectator, the 
conjuror cries, Now, tell me! and the answer 6, 4, 5 — 645, a pencil, is at once 
given. I have known this numeral vocabulary carried up to four thousand 
words, and the principle is capable of aln jst unlimited variation and evten. 
lion. 



THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. 41 

The origin of the appellative English, as the exclusive 
designation of a tongue employed by the Saxon, as well 
as the Anglian colonists of our fatherland, is not altogether 
clear. The etymology of the national names of both the 
principal immigrant races is very uncertain, but it is famil- 
iarly known, that for several centuries after, and not improb- 
ably before, the commencement of the Christian era, bands 
of warlike adventurers from the conterminous borders of what 
are now the Kingdom of Denmark and the German States, 
made frequent incursions into Britain, and at last established 
themselves as its masters. The native Celtic inhabitants, who 
were compelled to retire before the martial prowess of the 
strangers, do not seem to have distinguished very accurately 
between the different nationalities of their conquerors. A 
common name was applied by the Britons to the whole alien 
immigration ; and, though each tribe had its own domestic 
designation, they were, and still are, all called Saxons by the 
Celtic aborigines. 

Popular narrative has fixed the most important of these 
expeditions at about the middle of the fifth century, and it 
is said to have been composed chiefly of Jutes, or Jutland- 
ers, under the leadership of Ilengist and Horsa, who were 
afterwards joined by successive reinforcements from the 
Gothic tribes on the coast of the German Ocean. Among 
these are particularly named, first, the Saxon conquerors, who, 
at different periods, and under different leaders, subdued and 
colonized Sussex, Wessex, Essex, and Middlesex ; and sec- 
ondly, two considerable bodies of Angles from Sleswick, who 
occupied Suffolk and Norfolk, and the south-western districts 
of Scotland. These tribes, together with Frisians and emi- 
grants from other neighboring Scandinavian and Teutonic 



42 THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. 

countries, soon amalgamated, and gradually extended then 
joint sway over the whole island, except the more inacces 
sible provinces of Northern and Western Britain. 

Such are the traditional accounts of the Anglo-Saxon con- 
quest, as detailed by the Saxon Chronicle, and other native 
annals, and they have been received, without suspicion or in- 
quiry, by most succeeding historians. But the evidence on 
which these supposed facts rest, is of too doubtful character 
to command, by any means, implicit belief. The real history 
of this period is wrapped in the darkest obscurity, and we 
can hardly say that any thing is certain beyond the simple 
fact, that before the close of the sixth century after Christ 
the most important portion of Great Britain had been sub- 
dued, and was possessed, by Gothic tribes known to the indi- 
genous populations as Saxons. There is no historical proof 
by which we can identify the Anglo-Saxon language, and the 
people who spoke it, with any Continental dialect and na- 
tion ; nor, on the other hand, by which we can establish a 
diversity of origin or of speech between the Anglian and 
the Saxon colonists of Great Britain. But there is linguistic 
svidence of a great commingling of nations in the body of 
intruders. The Anglo-Saxon, in its obscure etymology, its 
confused and imperfect inflections, and its anomalous and 
irregular syntax, appears to me to furnish abundant proof of a 
diversity, not of a unity, of origin. It has not what is con- 
sidered the distinctive character of a modem, so much as of 
a mixed and ill-assimilated speech, and its relations to the 
various ingredients of which it is composed are just those of 
the present English to its own heterogeneous sources. It bor- 
rowed roots, and dropped endings, appropriated syntactical 
combinations without the inflections which made them logi- 



THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. 43 

cal, and had not yet acquired a consistent and harmonious 
structure when the Norman conquest arrested its develop- 
ment, and imposed upon it, or, perhaps we should say, gave 
a new stimulus to, the tendencies which have resulted in the 
formation of modern English. There is no proof that Anglo- 
Saxon was ever spoken anywhere but on the soil of Great 
Britain ; for the Heliand, and other remains of old Saxon, are 
not Anglo-Saxon, and I think it must be regarded, not as a lan- 
guage which the colonists, or any of them, brought with 
them from the continent, but as a new speech resulting from 
the fusion of many separate elements. It is, therefore, in- 
digenous, if not aboriginal, and as exclusively local and 
national in its character as English itself.* 

But independently of such internal evidence, it is very 
improbable that, at a period when there existed little politi- 
cal, or, so far as we have reason to believe, linguistic unity 
in any considerable extent of maritime territory occupied by 
the Gothic race, any one branch, or any one dialect, of that 
race, could have supplied a sufficient number of emigrants 
for so extensive conquest and occupation. The dialects of the 
islands and south-eastern coasts of the North Sea, are at this 
day extremely numerous and discordant^ the population 

* See Lecture vi. 

f The dialects referred to in the text are generally grouped under the com- 
mon denomination of Frisic or Frisian, but they vary so much both in structure 
and vocabulary, that, in many instances, they cannot be considered as having 
much direct relationship with each other. In no part of Europe are there so 
many speeches within the same area, which are mutually unintelligible to those 
who employ dialects held to be cognate. At least live principal varieties or 
patois are recognized in modern Frisic, and each of these is subdivided into 
several local jargons. No Frisic literature • can be said to exist, for neither the 
ancient legal codes, nor the few modern rhymes, constitute a body of writings 
sufficiently various and comprehensive to be dignified with such an appellation 
Accidences and partial vocabularies of several Frisic dialects have been com 



£4 THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. 

very mixed and diversified in blood ; and there is no reason 
to suppose that there was less diversity of language or of ori- 
gin among the inhabitants of those shores, at the rude and 
remote period of the conquest of Britain. To determine, 
therefore, the relative share of different tribes and different 
dialects in the formation of the Anglo-Saxon people and the 
Anglo-Saxon speech, would be a hopeless and an unprofita- 
ble task ; but we may safely adopt the general conclusion, 
that in both the Teutonic element predominated over the 
Scandinavian.* 



piled, but as, in spite of these and occasional dilettantisms in the way of verse, 
written Frisic is never employed for any practical purpose, the language has 
no orthography, and is, philologically speaking, an unwritten tongue. It is 
therefore subject to all the uncertainty and vacillation of other languages, which 
exist only in the mouth of the people ; nor is there any satisfactory evidence to 
show that it was ever much more consistent and homogeneous, as an independ- 
ent speech, than it is at this hour. The data are too insufficient in amount, and 
too vague and uncritical in character to serve as a basis for speculation upon 
the relations between Frisic as a whole, and other tongues ; and we might almost 
as well build arguments concerning the grammatical system of the Latin upon 
the modern patois of Normandy, Gascony, and Provence ; or construct a theory 
of the Anglo-Saxon inflections and syntax from a comparison of Tim Bobbin's 
dialogues, the mercantile jargon of Canton, and the Talkee-talkee of the negroes 
of Surinam. See Lecture xviii. 

* German and Germanizing philologists appear to me to make Frisic too ex- 
clusively Teutonic. Take for example the argument from the frequent termina" 
tion of the names of places in u m, as Hus u m and others, which is said to be 
in all cases a contraction of heim. Now there are, in unequivocally Scandina- 
vian districts, local names ending in um, which in these instances are taken 
from the dative plural of the original appellation of the locality. Thus, in Old 
Northern, Upsal was a plural, Uppsalir; at or in Upsal, dor i Up p solum. 
In speaking of towns, we use in English most frequently the objective with the 
prepositions at or m, and in like manner in Old Northern, the dative, as a or i 
Husum, would occur oftener than any other case of the name of that town. 
When the inflections were dying out, as in the confused mixture of races in 
Schleswig-Holstein and its borders, they did very early, the case oftenest in 
use would survive all others, and become the indeclinable name of the town, just 
as, in Danish and English, Holum is the only form for all the cases of the Ice* 
landic Holar, the name of a place in northern Iceland, remarkable as having 



THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. 45 

There is, moreover, pretty satisfactory evidence that An- 
gles formed some portion, at least, of the new population, 
and though we have no reliable direct proof of the emigra- 
tion into Britain of any tribe that had called itself Saxon 
vhile resident on Germanic soil, yet, apart from tradition. 
we are authorized to infer such an emigration from the local 
names Sussex, Essex, Wessex, and Middlesex, (South Sax- 
ons, West Saxons, East Saxons, and Middle Saxons ;) from 
the fact that all the intruders alike were named Saxons by 
the native Celts ; and from the further circumstance, that 
after the language was reduced to writing, it was called by 
those who spoke it Saxon as well as English. How then 
did England become the exclusive appellation of the country, 
English of the language? We have no evidence whatever 
of the application of any general or collective name to the 
people, the country, or the speech, before the introduction of 
Christianity into England. The new inhabitants of the isl- 



long possessed the only printing press in the island. In the case of Husum, 
the dative plural, which would mean at t/ie houses or at the village, is a much 
more probable etymology than Hush j em, (Haus-heim,) which would be 
pleonastic. These instances in the modern Scandinavian dialects are precisely 
analogous to the formation of Stanchio from is rav K<£, and other similar names 
in modern Greek, the accusative in that language supplying the place of the 
dative, which is obsolete. See, further, Appendix, 4. 

The names of the two brothers, Hengist and Horsa, who are said to have 
headed the most eventful incursion of the invaders, are words in one or another 
form common to all the Scandinavian and the Teutonic dialects. Both are 
names of the genus horse, but in most localities hengst is appropriated to the 
male, while in some, and particularly in Schleswig, horsa or hors is confined 
to the female animal. J. G. Kohl informs us that both the proper names are 
Btill current in the district from which the ancient conquerors are reported to 
have emigrated. A Danish colonel told the traveller that in a company of hia 
regiment there were two privates bearing these names ; and it happened, odd- 
ly, that in this case Hengist and Horsa, like Castor and Pollux, were still in- 
separably united, the places of the two soldiers being side by side in the ranks. 
Inseln u. Marschen Schlesw-Holst. i., 290. 



46 ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 

and became firi&t known to the Roman see through Anglian 
captives who were carried to Rome in the sixth century. 
The name of their tribe, in its Latinized form, Angli, we 
may suppose was bestowed by the Romans upon the whole 
people, and the derivative, Angli a, upon the territory it 
occupied. The Christian missionaries who commenced the 
conversion of Britain would naturally continue to employ 
the name by which the island had become known anew to 
them, and their converts, especially if no general name had 
been already adopted, would assume that which their teach- 
ers brought with them. This, in the absence of any satisfac- 
tory proof that the Angles were a particularly numerous or 
powerful element in the population, appears the most proba- 
ble reason that can now be assigned, why a people, who, in 
large proportion, retained for themselves and their several 
provinces the appellation of Saxon, and who were known to 
neighboring nations by no other name, should have surren- 
dered this hereditary designation, and given to their language 
the name of English, to their country that of England, or the 
land of the Angles. 

The language itself, in the earliest existing remains of the 
native literature, whether composed in Latin or in the ver- 
nacular, is generally called English, but sometimes Saxon. 
These remains are all of later date than the adoption of 
Christianity by the English people, and, of course, however 
prevalent the use of English as a national appellative may be 
in them, nothing can be thence inferred as to the extent to 
which the term was applied at earlier periods. The com- 
pound term, Anglo-Saxon, first occurs in the life of Alfred, 
ascribed to his contemporary, Asser, who calls that prince 
Angul-Saxonum Rex, king of the Anglo-Saxons. The 



ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 47 

employment of the word as a designation of the language 
and literature is much more recent.* 

The Anglo-Saxon language, though somewhat modified 
by Scandinavian influence, differs too widely from the Old 
Northern or Icelandic, (which I use as synonymous terms,) 
to afford any countenance to the supposition that either of 
them is derived from the other. Nor is there any good 
reason for rejecting the term Anglo-Saxon, and, as has been 
proposed, employing English as the name of the language, 
from the earliest date to the present day. A change of no- 
menclature like this would expose us to the inconvenience, 
not merely of embracing, within one designation, objects 
which have been conventionally separated, but of confound- 
ing things logically distinct; for though our modern English 
is built upon and mainly derived from the Anglo-Saxon, the 
two dialects are now so discrepant, that the fullest knowledge 
of one would not alone suffice to render the other intelligible 
to either the eye or the ear. They are too unlike in vocabu- 
lary and in inflectional character, to be still considered as one 
speech, though in syntactical structure they resemble each 
other more closely than almost any other pair of related an- 
cient and modern tongues. But even in this respect, the 
accordance is not so strict as some writers conceive it to be. 
Sir Thomas Browne, for instance, in the eighth of his Miscel- 

* The pretended formal imposition of the name of England upon the Anglo- 
Saxon possessions in Great Britain, by a decree of King Egbert, is unsupported 
by any contemporaneous or credible testimony. It is rejected as fabulous by 
most historical investigators, and it is certainly very improbable that a king, him- 
self a Saxon by birth and name, ruling Saxon subjects and Saxon provinces, 
ghould have voluntarily chosen for his realm a designation borrowed from an- 
other people and another territory. The title of Angliaj or Anglorum rex is much 
more naturally explained by the supposition that England and English had been 
already adopted as the collective names of the country and its inhabitants. 



4:8 ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 

Ian j Tracts, has, by a compendious process, established very 
nearly an absolute identity between the two. Taking, or, 
more probably, composing a page or two of English, from 
which all words of Latin or French origin are excluded, he 
has turned, or, to use a Germanism here not inappropriate, 
overset it into Anglo-Saxon, by looking out the corresponding 
terms in a Saxon Dictionary, and arranging them word for 
word as in English, with scarcely any attention to grammati- 
cal form, and has thus manufactured a dialect bearing no 
greater relation to Anglo-Saxon than the macaronic composi- 
tions of the sixteenth century do to classical Latin. 

In the want of more extensive means than the press has 
yet made accessible for the study of the dialects of the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries — the transition period — we 
cannot assign any precise date to the change from Anglo- 
Saxon to English ; nor, indeed, is there any reason to sup- 
pose that any such sudden revolution occurred in the Angli- 
can speech as to render it hereafter possible to make any 
thing more than an approximative and somewhat arbitrary 
determination of the period. For the purposes of an introduc- 
tory course, no nice distinctions on this point are necessary, 
and it will suffice to say that the dialect of the period be- 
tween the middle of the twelfth and the middle of the thir- 
teenth centuries partakes so strongly of the characteristics of 
both Anglo-Saxon and English, that it has been usually, and 
not inappropriately, called Semi-Saxon. 

It is a matter of still greater difficulty to refer the subse- 
quent history of English to fixed chronological epochs. The 
name of Old-English has been applied to the language as 
spoken from the latter date to the end of the reign of Ed- 
ward III. in 1377; that of Middle English to the form of 



EPOCHS IN ENGLISH. 49 

apeech extending from the close of Edward's reign to the 
death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, while all its subsequent 
phases are embraced under the common designation of Mod- 
ern-English. This is, in many respects, an objectionable 
division of our philological history. The Old-English era 
would include many of the works of Chaucer, which belong 
properly to a later stage of our literature, and at the same 
time exclude the English Bible of "Wycliffe and his fellow- 
laborers, whose style is more archaic than that of Chaucer. 
Middle-English would embrace the Confessio Amantis of 
Gower, who, philologically, is older than Chaucer, and the 
entire works of Hooker, as well as many of the plays of 
Shakespeare, both of whom belong unequivocally to the 
Modern-English period. It would, I think, be more accurate 
to commence the second era about the year 1350, and to ter- 
minate it with the third quarter of the sixteenth century. 

The first marked and specific change in the English lan- 
guage took place in the time, and in a very considerable 
degree, by the influence of Wycliffe, Gower, and Chaucer, 
the period of whose lives extended through the last three 
quarters of the fourteenth century, and included the brilliant 
reign of Edward III., and the glorious history of the Black 
Prince. The works of Wycliffe and his school, including their 
translations of the Bible, which are known to have been widely 
circulated, undoubtedly exerted a very important influence 
on the prose, and especially the spoken dialect. " The moral 
Gower," as Chaucer calls him, was inferior in ability to his 
two great contemporaries, and his literary influence less 
marked ; but his contributions to the improvement of his 
native tongue are of some importance ; and if it is true, as 
Fuller quaintly remarks, that he " left English very bad," it 



50 EPOCHS IN ENGLISH. 

is also true, as Fuller further observes, that he fcund it " very 
very bad." The great poetical merit of Chaucer, the popular 
character of his subjects, and his own high social position, 
gave him an ascendency in the rising literature of England 
that scarcely any subsequent writer has attained ; and there 
is perhaps no English author who has done more to mould, 
or rather to fix, the standard of the language, and to develop 
its poetical capabilities, than this great genius.* From this 
period to the introduction of printing by Caxton, and the 
consequent diffusion of classical literature in England, about 
the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth 
century, the language remained nearly stationary ; but at 
that period a revolution commenced, which was promoted by 
the Reformation, and, for a hundred years, English was in a 
state of transition. At the close of the period to which I 
have proposed to apply the name Middle-English, or about 
the year 1575, that revolution had produced its first great 
and most striking effect upon the structure and vocabulary 
of our tongue, and thus rendered possible the composition of 
such writings as those of the great theologian and the great 
dramatist, which signalized the commencement of the last and 
greatest era of our literature. English now became fixed in 
grammar and vocabulary, so far as a thing essentially so 
fleeting as speech can ever be said to be fixed, and for nearly 
three centuries it has undergone no very important change. 
Our orthography has indeed become more uniform, and our 
stock of words has been much enlarged, but he that is well 
read in Spenser, Hooker, and Shakespeare, not to speak of 
other great luminaries of that age, and above all, of the 

* See Lectures i., v., vi., and vii. 



PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS. 51 

standard translation of the Bible, which, however, appropri- 
ately belongs to an earlier period, will doubt whether it has 
gained much in power to expand the intellect or touch the 
heart.* 

Besides the words which express the general subject ot 
the present course, I must here notice certain other terms of 
art, and apologize for an occasional looseness in the use of 
them, which the poverty of the English grammatical nomen- 
clature renders almost unavoidable. Our word language has 
no conjugate adjective, and for want of a native term, Eng- 
lish scholars have long employed the Greek derivative, phi* 
lological, in a corresponding sense. But philology, and its 
derivative adjective, have acquired, in the vocabulary of 
Continental science, a different meaning from that which we 
give them, more comprehensive in one direction, more limited 
in another, and, to supply the want which a restriction of 
their earlier sense has created, linguistic or linguistics, a term 
Latin in its radical, Greek in its form, has been introduced. 
Philology was originally applied in Germany to the study of 
the classical languages and literature of Greece and Rome, 
as a means of general intellectual culture. In its pres- 



* " I take this present period of our English tung to be the verie height 
thereof, bycause I find it so excellently well fined both for the bodie of the tung 
itself, and for the customarie writing thereof, as either foren workmanship can 
giue it glosse, or as home-wrought hanling can giue it grace. When the age of 
our people which now vse the tung so well, is dead and departed, there will 
another succede, and with the people the tung will alter and change ; which 
change in the full haruest thereof maie prove comparable to this, but sure for 
this which we now vse, it seemcth eucn now to be at the best for substance, and 
the brauest for circumstance, and whatsoever shall become of the English state, 
the English tung cannot prove fairer than it is at this daie, if it maie please our 
learned sort so to esteme of it, and to bestow their trauell upon such a subject."— 
Mulcastcr, First Part of the Elementarie, p. 159. A. D. 1582. 



52 PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS. 

ent use, it is denned as a " historical science, whose end is the 
knowledge of the intellectual condition, labors, and products 
of a nation, or of cognate nations, at particular epochs of 
general chronology, with reference to the historical develop- 
ment of such nations." * There are, then, not one, namely, 
a Greek and Eoman, but many philologies, as many, indeed, 
as there are distinct peoples, or families of peoples, whose 
intellectual characters and action may be known through 
their languages. In philology thus considered, the study of 
languages is a means to the end specified in the definition 
just given. In linguistics, on the other hand, language itself, 
as one of the great characteristics of humanity, is the end, and 
the means are the study of general and comparative gram- 
mar. Every philology is the physiology of a species in lan- 
guage ; linguistics, the comparative anatomy of all the several 
systems of articulate communication between man and man. 
Linguistics, as a noun, has hardly become an English word. 
Philology, as used by most English and American writers, 
embraces the signification of the two words by which, in 
Continental literature, the study of language is characterized, 
according to the methods by which, and the objects for which, 
it is pursued. The adjectives, philological and linguistic, are 
employed, sometimes interchangeably in the same sense as 
philology, and sometimes as adjectives conjugate in meaning 
to the noun language. I shall not attempt, in this course, a 
strict conformity to Continental usage in the employment of 
these words, nor, indeed, would it be practicable to do so, 
until a new adjective shall be coined to relieve one of them 
of its double meaning ; but I shall endeavor so to use them 

* Heyse : Sprachwissenschaft, ff. 1*7. 



PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS. 53 

all, that the context or the subject matter will determine the 
sense which they are intended to bear for the occasion.* 

From the distinction here pointed out, it results that phi- 
lology concerns itself chiefly with that which is peculiar to 
a given speech and its literature, linguistics with those laws 
and properties which are common to all languages. Philol- 
ogy is conversant with distinctions ; linguistics with analo- 
gies. The course of lectures I am commencing is intended 
to be strictly philological, and I shall introduce illustrations 
from the field of linguistics only when they are necessary 
for etymological reasons, or to make the distinguishing traits 
of English more palpable by the force of contrast. 

* Our English grammatical and philological vocabulary is poor. We have 
no adjectire strictly conjugate to speech, tongue, language, verb, noun, and 
many other terms of art in this department. Linguistic is a barbarous hybrid, 
and, in our use, equivocal, as are also the adjectives verbal, nominal, and the like. 
A native equivalent to the sprachlich of some German writers, correspond- 
ing nearly to our old use of philological, as in the phrase, sprachliche 
Forschungen, where the adjective embraces the meaning both of philologi- 
cal and linguistic, is much wanted. 



LECTURE III. 

PRACTICAL USES OF ETYMOLOGY. 

In the last lecture, the distinction made in recent gram 
matical nomenclature between philology and linguistics was 
illustrated by comparing the former to the physiology of a 
single species, the latter to the comparative anatomy of dif- 
ferent species. Etymology, or the study of the primitive, 
derivative, and figurative forms and meanings of words, 
must of course have different uses, according to the object 
for which it is pursued. If the aims of the etymological in- 
quirer be philological, and he seek only a more thorough 
comprehension and mastery of the vocabulary of his own 
tongue, the uses in question, though not excluding other col- ' 
-ateral advantages, may be said to be of a strictly practical 
character ; or, in other words, etymology, so studied, tends 
directly to aid us in the clear understanding and just and 
forcible employment of the words which compose our own 
language. If, on the other hand, the scholar's objects be 
ethnological or linguistic, and he investigate the history pf 
words for the purpose of tracing the relations between differ- 
ent races or different languages, and of arriving at those gen- 



PHILOLOGICAL STUDIES. 8fc 

eral principles of universal grammar which determine the 
form and structure of all human speech, his studies are in- 
deed more highly scientific in their scope and method, but 
they aid him little in the comprehension, and, as experience 
abundantly shows, scarcely at all in the use, of his maternal 
tongue. But though I admit that philology is of a less rig- 
orously scientific character than linguistics, I by no means 
concede to the latter any pre-eminence as a philosophic study, 
or as requiring higher intellectual endowments for its success- 
ful cultivation ; and it cannot be disputed that, as a means 
of ethical culture, philology, connecting itself, as it does, with 
the whole mental and physical life of man, illustrating as 
well the inward thought and feeling as the outward action of 
a nation, has almost as great a superiority over linguistics as' 
history over pure mathematics. Philological studies, when 
philology, as explained in the last lecture, was restricted to 
the cultivation of the languages, literature, history, and arch- 
aeology of Greece and Rome, were very commonly called 
1 i t e r ae humaniores, or, in English, the humanities / and 
it is the conviction of their value as a moral and intellectual 
discipline, which has led scholars almost universally to as- 
cribe the origin of this appellation to a sense of their refining, 
elevating, and humanizing influence. This, however, I think, 
is an erroneous etymology. They were called 1 i t e r 03 hu- 
maniores, the humanities, by way of opposition to the 
literae divinae, or divinity, the two studies, philology 
and theology, then completing the circle of scholastic knowl- 
edge, which, at the period of the introduction of the phrase, 
scarcely included any branch of physical science. But though 
the etymology is mistaken, its general reception is an evi- 
dence oi the opinion of the learned as to the worth and im- 
portance of the study, and, now that so many modern litera- 



56 USES OF ETYMOLOGY. 

tures have attained to an excellence scarcely inferior to that 
of classic models, their special philologies have even stronger 
claims upon ns than those of ancient lore, because they are 
not only almost equally valuable as instruments of mental 
culture, but are more directly connected with the clear intel- 
ligence, and fit discharge of our highest moral, social, and 
religious duties. 

Etymology is a fundamental branch of all philological and 
all linguistic study. The word is used in two senses, or 
rather, the science of etymology has two offices. The one 
concerns itself with the primitive and derivative forms and 
significations of words, the other with their grammatical in- 
flections and modifications ; the one considers words independ- 
ently and absolutely, the other in their syntactical relations. 
In discussing the uses of etymology, I shall confine myself 
to the first of these offices, or that which consists in investi- 
gating the earliest recognizable shape and meaning of words, 
and tracing the history of their subsquent changes in form 
and signification. A knowledge of etymology, to such an 
extent as is required for all the general purposes of literature 
and of life, is attainable by aids within the reach of every 
man of moderate scholastic training. Our commonest dic- 
tionaries give, with tolerable accuracy, the etymologies of 
most of our vocabulary, and where these fail, every library 
will furnish the means of further investigation. It must be 
confessed, however, that no English dictionary at all fulfils 
the requisites either of a truly scientific or of a popular ety- 
mologicon. They all attempt too much and too little — too 
much of comparative, too little of positive etymology. Of 
course, in a complete thesaurus of any language, the etymol 
ogy of every word should exhibit both its philology and its 
linguistics, its domestic history, and its foreign relations, but 



ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 57 

in a hand-lexicon of any modern tongue, this wide range of lin- 
guistic research is misplaced, because it necessarily excludes 
much that is of more immediate importance to the under- 
standing and the use of the vocabulary. Richardson's, which, 
however, is faulty in arrangement, and too bulky for conven- 
ient use as a manual, best answers the true idea of an English 
dictionary, because it follows, more closely than any other, the 
history of the words it defines. For the purposes of general 
use, no foreign roots should be introduced into the etymologi- 
cal part of a dictionary, barely because they resemble, and are 
presumably cognate with, words of our own language. The 
selection of such should be limited to those from which the 
English word is known to be derived, and such others as, by 
their form or their meaning, serve more clearly to explain 
either its orthography or some of its significations. "What- 
ever is beyond this belongs to the domain of linguistics, com- 
parative grammar, ethnology, to a thesaurus not a dictionary, 
and it can find room in this latter only by excluding what, 
for the purposes of a dictionary, is of greater value. 

I have already assigned what seemed to me sufficient 
reasons for making the present course philological, not lin- 
guistic, and I cannot, without occupying time more appro- 
priately employed otherwise, enter into a discussion of the 
aims and importance of linguistic studies in their bearing 
upon etymology, the great question of the unity of the 
species, and the general laws of intellectual action, the high- 
est problems which unaided humanity can aspire to solve. I 
freely allow their profound interest and their strict scientific 
character, but they must, for the present, be the special 
property of the few, not, like the mother-tongue, the com- 
mon heritage of the many ; and I now again refer to them 
only to protest against the inference that I deny or depreci* 



58 EXTKAVAGANCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS. 

ate their worth, because I think it necessary, in a prepaiatorj 
course, to exclude them from consideration. 

The extravagance of etymologists has brought the whole 
study of Words into popular discredit ; and though that study 
is now pursued in much stricter accordance with philosophic 
method, instances of wild conjecture and absurd speculation 
are still by no means wanting. Menage, formerly often, and 
now sometimes, cited as an authority in French etymology, 
and of course with respect to the origin of English w T ords 
borrowed from the French, is among the boldest of these in- 
quirers. He hesitates not to assign any foreign primitive, no 
matter how distant the source, as the origin of the French 
word resembling it ; and when none such offers, he coins a Low- 
Latin root for the occasion. In such cases, the detection of 
the falsehood is difficult, its refutation next to impossible, for 
in the chaos of monkish and secular writers in that corrupted 
dialect, who can say what barbarisms may not occur ? Me- 
nage is not the only etymologist who has sinned in this way, 
for it is one of the safest and easiest of literary frauds. Dr. 
Johnson thought we were not authorized to deny that there 
might be witches, because nothing proved their non-existence ; 
and the same principle may compel us to pause in disputing 
a plausible etymology, for want of evidence to show that the 
supposed root does or does not actually exist in a given vo- 
cabulary. The wise old Fuller, whom no lover of wit, truth, 
beauty, and goodness can ever tire of reading, says, in refer- 
ence to an extravagant etymology : 

" As for those that count the Tatars the offspring of the 
ten tribes of Israel, which Salmanasar led away captive, be- 
cause Tatari or Totari signifieth in the Hebrew and Syriack 
tongue a residue or remnant, learned men have sufficiently 
confuted it. And surely it seemeth a forced and overstrained 



EXTRAVAGANCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS. 59 

deduction to farre-fetch the name of Tartars from a Hebrew 
word, a language so far distant from them. But no more here- 
of ; because, perchance, herein the woman's reason hath a mas- 
culine truth ; and the Tartarians are called so, because they 
are [called] so. It ma}' be curious etymologists (let them 
lose their wages who work in difficult trifles) seek to reap 
what was never sown, whilst they study to make those words 
speak reason, which are only voces ad placitum, imposed at 
pleasure." 

The theory of Fuller was better than his practice, and he 
not unfrequently indulged in etymological speculations as 
absurd as that which he ridicules respecting the Tatars, for 
he derives compliment, not, as he says others did, "a com- 
pletic/ie mentis," but "a complete mentiri," be- 
cause compliments are usually completely mendacious ; and 
elsewhere he quotes with seeming assent Sir John Harring- 
ton's opinion that the old English elf and goblin came from 
the names of the two great political factions of the Empire, 
the Guelphs and Ghibellines. One can hardly believe Roger 
Ascham serious in deriving war from warre or werre, the 
old form of the comparative worse, because war is wo?'se than 
peace ; * but even this derivation is only less absurd than 



* Allied to this is Spenser's derivation of world: 

But when the word woxe old, it woxe warre old, 
(Whereof it hight,) 

Faerie Queen, B. iv., C. viii., S. xxxi. 

The ingenious author of the excellent little work on English Synonyms, editea 
by Archbishop Whately, supposes world to be the participle whirled, and saya 
the word was evidently expressive of roundness. The wh in whirl, (Jiv in the 
corresponding Gothic words,) is radical, and would not have been represented 
in Anglo-Saxon by w, as in w o r u 1 d, w e o r u 1 d , world. Besides this, the word 
world is older than the knowledge of the globular form or the rotation of the 
earth among the Gothic tribes. A still more conclusive argument against thia 
etymology is the fact, that the Anglo-Saxon woruld, the Icelandic verolld. 



60 EXTRAVAGANCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS. 

Blackstone's of parson from persona, persona ejole 
sise, because the parson personates or represents the church. 
The most extraordinary word-fanciers we have had in English 
literature are Murray and Ker. Murray derives all English, 
in fact all articulate words, from nine primary monosyllables, 
which are essentially natural to primitive man. The family 
likeness between the nine is so strong that Murray might, 
with much convenience and small loss of probability, have 
reduced them to one, for they all agree in their vowel and 
final consonant. The catalogue of these surprisingly prolific 
roots is this : 1, ag, wag, or hwag ; 2, bag, or bwag ; 3, 
dwag ; 4, cwag ; 5, lag ; 6, mag ; 7, nag ; 8, rag ; and 9, 
swag. Xer is somewhat less ambitious, but quite as original 
and ingenious in his theories. He found the English public 
simple enough to buy two editions of a work in two vol- 
umes, the object of which is to show that a very large pro- 
portion of our current English proverbs are, not translations 
or imitations of Dutch ones, but mere mispronunciations, 
corruptions of common Dutch phrases and expressions totally 
different in meaning from that which is ascribed to the prov- 
erbs, as we employ them. Thus the proverbial phrase, ' He 
took the bull by the horns,' is a corruption of 'hii tuck 
tije bol by die hoorens,' which means, here head 
calls contrivance in ; that it is as it ought to be. ' As still 
as a mouse,' is, 'als stille als er mee hose,' as still 
as one without shoes, and even the national cry, ' Old Eng- 
and forever ! ' is not plain English at all, but Low-Dutch for 
4 Hail to your country — evince your zeal for her ! ' 

did not mean the earth, the physical, but the moral, the human world, the 
Latin seeulum. The Anglo-Saxon name of the earth was middan-eard, 

or middan-geard, corresponding to the Moeso-Gothic midjungards. 

The most probable etymology of world seems to be wer, (cognate with the 

Latin vir,) man, and old, age or time. 



EXTRAVAGANCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS, 61 

The general idea is of course too absurd to be met by ar- 
gument, and the book is of about the same philological value 
as Swift's Medical Consultation, and other trifles, where the 
words are Latin in form, but similar in sound to English 
words of different signification, so that the Latin words i s , 
his, honor, sic, mean, Is his Honor sick? The specula- 
tions of more recent and more eminent philologists, though 
certainly made more plausible by historical evidence and by 
apparent analogies, are, sometimes, not less unreasonable.* 

Crambe, a character in the Memoirs of Scriblerus much 
given to punning, declares that he was always under the 
dominion of some particular word, which formed the theme 
of his puns. Muys, a very late and learned German philol- 
ogist, who occupies himself with Greek etymology, is, un- 
consciously no doubt, under the influence of a similar verbal 



* I certainly do not intend to class Dr. Latham -with the dreamers to whom 
I refer in the text, but I must be permitted here to notice what is, at least, an 
inaccuracy of expression in his etymology of our English word drake. He says, 
(English Language 2d Edition, p. 214,) "It [drake] is derived from a word with 
which it has but one letter in common; viz., the Latin anas, duck." The 
common name of the duck in the Gothic languages is doubtless allied to anas, 
and in most of them the same root occurs in forms which contain the consonant- 
al elements of the word drake. Two of these elements, the r and k, arc signs of 
the masculine termination. The d is radical, as are also the corresponding mute 
t in the Latin anas, (genitive anat-is,) and the n which has been dropped 
from drake, or rather perhaps formed the d by coalescence with the t, as in 
modern Greek, where vr is pronounced d, and therefore drake and anas are 
related as being both derived from a common root. But to assert that drake 
is derived from anas is not only a violation of the legitimate rules of etymolog- 
ical deduction, but it involves the historical improbability of affirming that a 
people as old as the Romans themselves were without a name for one of the 
commonest and most important game-birds of their climate, until they borrowed 
one from their foreign invaders. In fact, if either nation received the word 
from the other, instead of both inheriting it from some common but remote 
source, the habits of the bird in question, whose birthplace and proper home is 
in the far North, would render it more probable that the Gothic was the original, 
the Latin the derivative form. 



62 EXTRAVAGANCE OF ETYMC LOGZSTS. 

crotchet. The particular word which tyrannizes over his re 
searches is the German verb stossen,in English to pus A. 
There are several Sanscrit roots possessing this signification, 
and, according to our author, there are few Greek words not 
derived from some one of them. His own special favorite 
among these Sanscrit radicals is dhu, and he finds a proba- 
bility, amounting very nearly to certainty, that the folio win g 
words, as well as hundreds of others equally discrepant from 
the primitive type, are derived from it : Agamemnon, Asia, 
Athene, JEgyptus, /3cq/jl6<;, Gallus, Geryon, Demeter, Eido- 
thea, Helle, Enarete, Zephyrus, Hebe, Jocasta, Leda, Poly- 
deuces, Sisyphus. The process by which these derivations 
are made out is as simple as possible. Take for instance 
Gallus. Beginning with dhu, spelled d, h, u, if you cut 
off d, you have h u , whence it is but a step to liva; h v a 
passes readily into ga, and by adding Z, you obtain gal, 
which wants only the inflectional final syllable us, with the 
reduplication of the Z, and your word is finished. After this, 
we may well say that etymology, like misery, makes us ac- 
quainted with strange bed-fellows. 

In admitting that most English etymological dictionaries 
point out the origin of the greater part of our vocabulary, 
I must limit the concession to words derived, as are the great 
majority of ours, directly from Greek, Latin, French, or An- 
glo-Saxon roots still to be found in the recorded literature of 
those languages. With respect to words which have tradi- 
tionally descended from the old Gothic storehouse, and which 
do not occur in the existing remains of Anglo-Saxon litera- 
ture, or which have been borrowed from remoter sources, and 
especially with respect to the attempts made by lexicograph- 
ers to trace English words, through the languages I have 
Darned, back to still older dialects, and to detect affinities to 



EXTRAVAGANCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS. 63 

words belonging to the vocabularies of languages not of 
the Gothic or Romance stock, I know no English dictionary 
which is worthy of the smallest confidence. Take for exam- 
ple our noun and verb issue. Nothing can be plainer than 
its origin to one who is content with the simple truth. We 
have borrowed it from the obsolete French is sir, which, as 
well as the cognate Italian u s c i r e , is evidently a modern 
form of the compound Latin infinitive ex- ire, to go out. 
A celebrated lexicographer gives, as related words, the French 
and Italian forms, but he fails to see that they are derived 
from the Latin ex ire, and suggests that they coincide with 
the Ethiopic watsa ! The tendency of this constant search 
after remote analogies is to lead the inquirer to overlook 
near and obvious sources of derivation, and to create a per- 
plexity and confusion with regard to the real meaning of 
words, by connecting them with distant roots slightly similar 
in form, and, frequently, not at all in signification. There 
are, in all literatures, numerous instances where words have 
been corrupted in orthography, and finally changed in mean- 
ing, in consequence of the adoption of a mistaken etymol- 
ogy. An example of this is the common adjective abom- 
inable, which was once altered in form and meaning by a 
mistake of this sort, though better scholarship has now re- 
stored it to its true orthography, and more nearly to its prop- 
er signification. It is evidently regularly formed from the 
Latin verb abo minor, itself derived from ab and omen. 
Abominable accordingly involves the notion of that which 
is in a religious sense profane and detestable, or, in a word, 
of evil omen ; and Milton never uses it, or the conjugate 
noun abominations, except with reference to devilish, pro- 
fane, or idolatrous objects. Quite early in English literature 
some sciolist fancied that the true etymology was a b and 



64 TRUE METHOD OF ETYMOLOGY. 

homo, and that its proper meaning was repugnant to hu 
manity, inhuman. This derivation being accepted, the or- 
thography was changed to abAominable, and in old English 
bonks it is often used in a sense corresponding to its supposed 
origin, nor has it even yet fully recovered its appropriate 
meaning. 

We may, in numerous instances, trace back the use of a 
word to a remote antiquity, and find at the same time that it 
was employed in many languages between which we are un- 
able to detect any historical or even grammatical relation. 
When, in such case, any of the foreign derivative or inflec- 
tional changes of the root throw light on the form of the 
corresponding English word, or when its radical meaning 
serves to explain any of the different senses which we as- 
cribe to our own vocable, and which are not deducible from 
its known historical etymology, the fact of the existence of 
such a word becomes philologically, as well as linguistically, 
interesting. If, however, the foreign word does not aid us in 
understanding or employing the corresponding English one, 
whatever may be its importance in linguistics, it is in Eng 
lish philology, and of course etymology, wholly insignificant. 
I will borrow an example from languages which I can hardly 
presume to be familiar to many of my audience, and others 
from some domestic sources. The Portuguese word sau- 
dade, which expresses an affectionate, regretful longing for 
a lost or absent beloved object, has been said by Portuguese 
scholars to be peculiar to their own tongue, and to have no 
equivalent in any other European speech. A similar word, 
however, with the same general, and often the same precise, 
signification, occurs in Icelandic, Swedish and Danish, in the 
respective forms sakna8r, saknad, and Savn. Now 
there is no link of relationship, by which any actual connec- 



uses :f etymology. 65 

fcion can be made out between the Scandinavian and the 
Portuguese words, no common source to which both can be 
referred, nor does the form or meaning of either serve in the 
least to explain those of the other. The coincidence is a re- 
markable fact ; it may become linguistically important ; but 
at present it is not of the slightest consequence to the phi- 
lology of either of the languages in question. In like man- 
ner, I understand the English words father, mother, brother, 
sister, not at all the better for knowing that they are used in 
forms not widely differing from our own, in most of the lan- 
guages belonging to the Indo-European family. 

It will be found pretty generally true, that with respect 
to words used in their simple form and literal sense, the study 
of their derivation is of little use in aiding us to form a just 
conception of their meaning ; but if they are compounds, 
and especially if their employment in our own language is a 
figurative one, we are essentially assisted by a knowledge of 
their etymology. If you tell a child that our noun and ad- 
jective purple is the Anglicised form of the Latin purpu- 
reus, a word of similar signification, you tell him nothing. 
So if, for the origin of precipitate and precipitation, he is 
barely referred to the Latin praeceps as the source of these 
English words, he has learned what is not worth remembering. 
But if you go further, and explain to him that prseceps is 
a compound of prse, before, and the root of caput, the 
head, so that prseceps and precipitate both mean head- 
foremost, he will have gained an entirely new conception of 
the force of the words. 

I will illustrate the emptiness of etymology as usually 
pursued, and its practical value when studied by simpler and 
less pretentious methods, by the history of our English word 
5 



6C) ETYMOLOGY OF GEilN. 

grain in a single one of its many senses. I observe in read- 
ing II Penseroso that Milton describes Melancholy as clad 



All in a robe of darkest 



grain. 



Upon turning to Webster for an explanation of grain, I find 
its etymology in twelve closely printed lines, giving twenty- 
five words, which the lexicographer supposes to be cognate 
with grain, from thirteen languages. Fifteen meanings, sev- 
eral of which, though distinguished, are indistinguishable, 
are ascribed to grain. Among them is dye or tincture, no 
particular hue being assigned to the dye, and as an exempli- 
fication of this sense of grain, the fine descriptive invocation 
to Melancholy, to which I have alluded, is cited : 

" Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure, 
Sober, steadfast and demure, 
All in a robe of darkest grain. 
Flowing with majestic train." 

It is evident that the lexicographer understands Milton as 
clothing the Divinity simply in a garb of a dark color, with- 
out indication of the quality of the color ; but this concep- 
tion of the meaning of grain, as used in the passage, is wholly 
erroneous, as I shall proceed to show. 

Of the twenty-five words referred to in Webster's ety- 
mology, only the Latin granum, with three or four deriv- 
atives from it in as many modern languages, and the Scan- 
dinavian gren, have any probable affinity with grain, in 
origin or in any of its significations, and with the exception 
of the sense of a prong or tine, and perhaps, also, of fibre 
and the imitations of fibre in painting, every one of the 
fifteen meanings ascribed to the word is referable to the 
Latin granum, and not to any of the other roots adduced. 
Both these exceptions belong to a Gothic radical (in Swe 



ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIN. 67 

dish, gren) signifying a branch or twig, and still extant in 
the Scottish dialect with the same sense. 

The history of the word grain, in the sense of a dye, ia 
this: The Latin granum signifies a seed or kernel, and 
it was early applied to all small objects resembling seeds, and 
finally to all minute particles. A species of oak, or ilex, the 
quercus coccifera of botanists, common on all the Med- 
iterranean coasts, and especially in Spain, and there called 
coscoja, (a corruption of the Latin cusculium or quis- 
q u i 1 i u m ,) is frequented by an insect of the genus coccus, 
the dried body, or rather ovarium, of which furnishes a variety 
of red dyes. From its round seed-like form, the prepared coc- 
cus was called in later Latin, granum, and so great were 
the quantity and value of the coccum or granum pro- 
duced in Spain, that, according to Pliny, it paid half the 
tribute of the province.* It is even said that the city and 
territory of Granada derived their name from the abundance 
of granum, coccum, or grain, gathered there. Gran u m 
becomes gran a in Spanish, grain e in French, and from 
one of these is derived the particular use of the English word 
grain, which we are now investigating. Grain, then, as a 
coloring material, strictly taken, means the dye produced by 
the coccus insect, often called, in commerce and in the arts, 
Tcermes, but inasmuch as the kermes dye, like that extracted 

* Coccum is from the Greek k6kkos, a kernel or berry. k6kkos was one of 
the names applied by the Greeks to the insect and the tree on which it bred. 
From kokkos comes the adjective kokkivos, denoting the color obtained from the 
insect, as also the Latin cocci n us and coccineus employed in the same 
sense. In the Wycliffite translations of the Bible, this word is found in eight dif- 
ferent forms, cok being the nearest to the root, coctyn the most remote from it. 
Cottyn, which occurs in Apocalypse xvi. 12, in the version printed as WvclinVa 
in Bagster's Hexapla, is either a typographical error, or a various reading foi 
coctyn, and not an early orthography of cotton. 

The form coccus (masculine) is the modern scientific name of the insect , 
but I believe the neuter, coccum, alone occurs in classical Latin. 



68 ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIN. 

from the murex of Tyre, is capable of assuming a consider* 
ble variety of reddish tones or hues, Milton and other Eng- 
lish poets often use grain as equivalent to Tyrian purple. 
We will now apply this etymology to the interpretation of 
the passage which Webster cites from Milton, and will also 
examine all the other instances in which grain is employed 
in the sense of a color by that poet and by Shakespeare. 
First, then, the verses from II Penseroso : 

"Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure, 
Sober, steadfast and demure, 
All in a robe of darkest grain. 
Flowing with majestic train." 

Here the epithet " darkest," and the character and attributes 
of the Divinity who is clothed in grain, show that the poet 
meant, not, as Webster supposes, a mourning black, or a dull, 
neutral tint, but the violet shade of purple. What a new 
beauty of imagery this explanation sheds on one of Milton's 
most exquisite creations ! 

Coleridge, who, of all English writers, is most attentive 
to etymology, and most scrupulously accurate in the use of 
words, in the preface to his Aids to Eenection has this pas- 
sage, apparently, however, a quotation : " doing as the dyers 
do, who, having first dip't their silks in colors of less value, 
then give them the last tincture of crimson in grain" thus 
employing the word with a just appreciation of its meaning 
in ordinary poetic usage, but assigning to it a lighter shade 
than the purple or violet which it evidently designates in the 
passage cited from II Penseroso. It should, however, be ob- 
served, by way of note, that the process of dyeing, in ancient 
times when both grain and Tyrian purple were in use as col- 
oring materials, was nearly the reverse of that described by 
Coleridge ; for Pliny, speaking of the practice of dyeing 



ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIN. 69 

with two colors or shades of color, says : " Nay, it will not 
serve their turne to mingle the ahovesaid tinctures of sea« 
fishes, but they must also doe the like by the die of land- 
colors ; for when a wool or cloth hath taken a crimson or 
skarlet in graine, it must be dyed again in the Tyrian purple, 
to make the light red, and fresh lustie-gallant. As touching 
the graine serving to give tincture, it is red, and cometh out 
of Galatia, or else about Emerita in Portugal," &c. Hol- 
land's Pliny, ix., 41. 

Again, in the 11th Book of Paradise Lost, v. 243-9, Mil- 
ton employs the same word to denote still another tone of 
color : 

" The archangel soon drew nigh, 
Not in his shape celestial, but as man 
Clad to meet man : over his lucid arms 
A military vest of purple flowed 
Livelier than Meliboean, or the grain 
Of Sarra, worn by kings and heroes old 
In time of truce ; Iris had dipped the woof." 

In this passage a brighter color, approaching to scarlet, 
is evidently meant. Now, grain of Sarra is grain of Tyre, 
Sarra being used by some Latin authors for Tyrus, and grain 
of Sarra is equivalent to purple of Tyre, Milton here em- 
ploying, as I have just observed, the name of the color ob- 
tained from the kermes, coccus or grain, as synonymous with 
purple of Tyre, which latter dye was the product of different 
species of shell-fish.* The Greek iropfyvpeos, and the Latin 

* The ancient writers carefully distinguish between the costly shell- fish 
purple and the cheaper coccum. Thus Martial V. 23 : 

Non nisivelcocco madida, vel murice tincta 
Veste nites. 
And Ulpian Dig. xxxii. 1, 70, 13. 

Purpurae appellatione omnis generis purpuram contineri puto, sed 
toccum non continebitur. 

There is an interesting and even eloquent passage on the value attached bj 
the Roman9 to the true purple in Pliny, Nat. Hist. IX. 36. 



70 ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIN. 

purpureus, embraced all shades of color between scarlet 
and dark violet inclusive, because all these hues were ob- 
tained from shell-fish by different mixtures and processes. In 
fact, though in common speech we generally confine our use 
of the English purple to the violet hue, yet it is employed 
poetically, and in reference to ceremonial costumes, to express 
as wide a range of colors as the corresponding Greek and 
Latin adjectives. 

In describing the " proper shape " of the Archangel Ka- 
phael in the Fifth Book of Paradise Lost, the poet uses grain 
in the sense of purple, and gives to it at once the whole ex- 
tent of its varied significations : 

Six wings he wore, to shade 
His lineaments divine : the pair that clad 
Each shoulder broad came mantling o'er his breast 
With regal ornament ; the middle pair 
Girt like a starry zone his waist, and round 
Skirted his loins and thighs with downy gold 
And colors dipp'd in heaven ; the third his feet 
Shadowed from either heel with feathered mail, 
Sky-tinctured grain. 

Those who remember the hues which the painters of the 
sixteenth century give to the wings of angels, will be at no 
loss to understand the epithet sky-tinctured, which here qual- 
ifies grain. Sky-tinctured is not necessarily azure, for sky, 
in old English and the cognate languages, meant clouds, and 
Milton does not confine its application to the concave blue, 
but embraces in the epithet all the brighter tints which be- 
long to meteoric phenomena. Doubtless he had in his mind 
the angels that he had seen depicted by the great Italian mas- 
ters, and chose the phrase " sky-tinctured grain " as embody- 
ing, like their pinions, all the gorgeous spontaneous hues of 
gun-lit cloud, and rainbow, and cerulean vault, together with 
the richest colors which human cunning had extracted from 



ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIN. 71 

the materials of creative nature. It is interesting to observe 
how the brilliancy of the image floating in the poet's fancy 
pervades the whole passage, and anticipates, by a vague and 
general expression, the specification of the particular colors 
which he ascribes to the wings of the archangel ; for in hia 
description of the first pair, which 

Came mantling o'er his breast 
With regal ornament : 

he, no doubt, meant to suggest the imperial purple, the ap- 
propriate cognizance of royalty. 

In Comus [748] we find grain again employed as the name 
of a particular color : 

" It is for homely features to keep home, 
They had their name thence ; coarse complexions, 
And cheeks of sorry grain will serve to ply 
The sampler, and to tease the housewife's wool. 
What need a vermeil tinctured lip for that, 
Love-darting eyes, or tresses like the morn ?" 

Grain here does not refer to the texture of the skin, which 
is sufficiently indicated by the epithet coarse in the preceding 
line, but to the color, the vermilion of the cheek and lips 
which, for those devoted to such humble duties, the enchanter 
Comus thinks may well be sorry or of inferior tint. This 
interpretation is confirmed by a passage in Chaucer, 

" His lippes reed as rose, 
His rode is like scarlet en grayn ;" 

rode meaning complexion. And in the epilogue to tha 
Nonnes Preestes Tale, in Tyrwhitt's edition, Chaucer, speak- 
ing of a man of a sanguine complexion, says : 

Him nedeth not his colour for to dien, 
With Brazil, ne with grain of Portingale. 

The phrase purple in-grain, applied to the beard in Mid- 



72 ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIN. 

summer Night's Dream, I. 2, signifies a color obtained from 
kermes, and doubtless refers to a hair-dye of that material : 

Bottom. — Well, I will undertake it. What beard were I 
best to play it in ? 

Quin. — Why, what you will. 

Bottom. — I will discharge it in either your straw-colored 
beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, 
or your French crown-colored beard, your perfect yellow. 

Again, Webster defines the phrase to dye in grain, " to 
dye in the raw material, as wool or silk, before it is manufac- 
tured." That the phrase is popularly misunderstood, and 
has long been commonly used in this sense is true, but the 
original signification is dyed with grain or kermes. 

The explanation of this familiar and figurative sense, 
which is given by the lexicographer as the proper and literal 
one, is simple. The color obtained from kermes or grain was 
a peculiarly durable, or as it is technically called, a fast or 
fixed dye, for fast used in this sense is, etymologic ally, fixed. 
When then a merchant recommended his purple stuffs, as 
being dyed in grain, he originally meant that they were dyed 
with kermes, and would wear well, and this phrase, by a com- 
mon process in language, was afterwards applied to other col- 
ors, as a mode of expressing the quality of durability.* Thus 
in the Comedy of Errors, (iii. 2,) to the observation of An- 
tipholus : 

That's a fault that water will mend — 

Dromio replies : 

No, Sir, 'tis in grain ; Noah's flood could not do it. 



* The bright reds of the old Brusse/s tapestry, so remarkable for the durabil- 
ity, as well as the brilliancy of their tints, are known to have been dyed with 
kermes or grain. 



ETYMOLOGY OF tfRAIN. 



73 



And in Twelfth Night, (act 1, scene 5,) when Olivia had 
unveiled, and speaking of her own face had asked : 

Is it not well done ? 

to Viola's insinuation that her complexion had been improved 
by art ; 

Excellently done, if God did all ; 

Olivia replies : 

Tis in grain, Sir ; 'twill endure wind and weather. 

In both these examples it is the sense of permanence, a 
well-known quality of the purple produced by the grain or 
Jcermes, that is expressed. It is familiarly known that if wool 
be dyed before spinning, the color is usually more permanent 
than when the spun yarn or manufactured cloth is first dipped 
in the tincture. When the original sense of grain grew less 
familiar, and it was used chiefly as expressive of fastness of 
color, the name of the effect was transferred to an ordinary 
known cause, and dyed in grain, originally meaning dyed 
with kermes, then dyed with fast color, came at last to sig- 
nify dyed in the wool or other raw material. The verb in- 
grain, meaning to incorporate a color or quality with the 
natural substance, comes from grain used in this last sense, 
and is now very extensively employed in both a literal and a 
figurative acceptation. 

Kermes, which I have used as a synonym of gran a or 
grain, is the Arabic and Persian name of the coccus insect, 
and the word occurs in a still older form, krmi, in Sanscrit. 
From this root are derived the words carmine and crimson, 
common to all the European languages. The Komans some- 
times applied to the coccus the generic name ver mi cuius, 
a little worm or insect. Y e r m i c u 1 u s is the diminutive of 
vermis, which is doubtless cognate with the Sanscrit krmi, 



74 ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIN. 

as is also the English word worm. From vei n i c u 1 u s cornea 
vermilion, the name of an allied color, erroneously supposed 
to be produced by the kermes, though in fact of a different 
origin, and I may add that cochineal, as the name both of a 
dye which has now almost wholly superseded the European 
grain, and of the American insect which produces it, is de- 
rived, through the Spanish, from coccum, the Latin name 
of the Spanish insect. Johnson, and even Richardson, mis- 
take the meaning of grain, and ascribe to it the same signifi- 
cation as Webster. Richardson derives it from the Saxon 
geregnan, certainly a wrong etymology, and they both 
refer to most of the passages I have quoted, as exemplifica- 
tions of the erroneous definition they have given it. This is a 
remarkable oversight, because grain, as the English for coc- 
cum, was in very general use in the seventeenth century, 
and it is only recently that kermes has superseded it. Good 
exemplifications of this employment of the word will be 
found in Holland's Pliny, i. 259, 261, 461, ii. 114, and in 
many other old English writers. 

It will, I think, be admitted that in every passage which 
I have cited in illustration of the meaning of the word grain, 
the knowledge of its true origin and signification gives addi- 
tional force and beauty to the thought in the expression of 
which it is employed, and I have selected it as a striking ex- 
ample of the advantages to be derived from the careful study 
of words, and especially of the light which is thus often 
thrown upon obscure figurative expressions, as contrasted 
with the insignificance of the bare fact, that the same word 
or root exists in other languages. It is, however, rarely the 
case that a simple uncompounded word £0 well repays the 
labor of investigation, though the analysis of many com- 
pound words will be found equally instructive. 



ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIN. 75 

The importance of habitual attention to the exact mean- 
ing of words, considered simply as a mental discipline, can 
hardly be overrated, and etymology is one of the most ef- 
ficient means of arriving at their true signification. But ety- 
mology alone is never a sure guide. In passing from one 
language to another, words seldom fail to lose something of 
their original force, or to acquire some new significance, and 
we can never be quite safe on this point, until we have estab- 
lished the precise meaning of a word by a comparison of 
different passages where it occurs in good authors. 



LECTURE IV. 

FOREIGN HELPS TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLISH. 

Fkom the opinions I have already expressed, it will have 
been observed, that I do not hold any wide range of linguistic 
learning necessary to the attainment of a good knowledge of 
English etymology. I am equally well persuaded that Eng- 
lish grammar, so far as respects the application of its principles 
to practical use, may be thoroughly mastered with little aid 
from foreign sources. The purpose of the present remarks 
will be to enforce this opinion, and in a cursory way to point 
out how far the study of foreign languages is useful in this 
respect, and what particular tongues are most important to 
the student for the purposes of English philology. In con- 
sidering the subject of grammatical inflections in a subsequent 
part of the course, I shall particularly notice the relations 
between inflected and uninflected languages, and for this 
reason I shall, on this occasion, refer to the grammar of the 
classical languages only in very general terms.* 

* A speaker, who strives to accustom himself to accuracy of thought and 
precision of expression, is often made painfully sensible of the danger of mis- 
apprehension to which he is exposed in discoursing upon subjects incapable of 
illustration by visible symbols, representations, or experiments. The danger is 



11 

It is an apophthegm of Goethe, that " He who is ac 
quainted with no foreign tongue knows nothing of his own." 
The indiscriminate admiration with which this great writer is 
regarded by his followers, leads them to consider his most 
trivial and unguarded utterances as oracles. Even so able a 
linguist as Heyse has quoted this apophthegm as an authority 
in proof of the value and importance of linguistic studies ; but 
I must express my total dissent from both what is expressed 
and what is implied in this sweeping declaration. If, by 
knowledge, is meant the power of expressing or conceiving the 

much increased, if the range of his discussion is comprehensive. His language 
must necessarily be condensed, and his propositions must succeed each other 
with a rapidity which hardly allows the unprepared hearer to distinguish and 
comprehend them. Besides this, he must often express himself in general terms, 
omitting the exceptions and qualifications which are necevssary for the exhibition 
of the whole truth. In this latter necessity, lies one of the most fertile sources 
of error with respect to all those doctrines which are communicated by general 
propositions. Again, so strong is the natural tendency to generalize that which 
is particular, that every public teacher runs also the opposite risk of being un- 
derstood to announce as universal propositions opinions which he intends to 
confine to very special cases. It is against this last mistake that I am at this 
moment particularly solicitous to guard. While I admit that a knowledge of 
other tongues, including the Greek and Latin as well as the modern dialects 
more nearly allied to our own, may be so employed as to be of great value as 
an auxiliary to the study of English — a truth of which this course of lectures 
will adduce many illustrations — I am proceeding to avow my conviction, that 
the value of foreign philological studies, in this particular respect, is too often 
overrated by classical scholars. And here I beg not to be understood as mean- 
ing any thing more than I express. I am speaking of the study of one gram- 
mar as an aid to the knowledge of another; of languages, not of letters; of 
the forms of speech, not of the embodied thoughts of the great masters of 
literature in other tongues. As a means of that encyclopedic culture which is 
one of the most imperious demands of modern society, an acquaintance with 
foreign, and especially with classical, literature is indispensable, because t ho 
records of knowledge and of thought are niany-tongued, and even if a genial 
writer could have framed his original conceptions or equivalents of them in a 
different speech, it is certain that another mind can, only in the fewest cases, 
adequately translate them. We can therefore, in general, know little of ancient 
or foreign intellectual action, without a knowledge of the medium of thought 
ji which that action has been exerted. 



78 goethe's opinions on philology. 

laws of a particular language in formal rules, theopini >n mav 
be well founded, but if it refers to the capacity of understand- 
ing, and skill in properly using, our own tongue, all obser- 
vation shows it to be very wide of the truth. Goethe, him- 
self, certainly knew German, and his intellectual training and 
general culture were no doubt much advanced by the study 
of other literatures, but, if tried by the present standard of 
philological learning, or even by that of his own time, he 
must be pronounced at best an indifferent linguist, and it 
would be very difficult to trace any of the excellences of his 
marvellously felicitous style to the direct imitation, or even 
the unconscious influence, of foreign models. He declares, 
himself, that his knowledge of French was acquired by prac- 
tice, " without grammar or instruction," and remarks that in 
his early years his attention was specially devoted to German 
writers of the sixteenth century. Probably the study of these 
authors contributed more than any thing else to the diction 
he finally adopted ; for his writings contain no evidence of 
familiarity with the remoter etymological sources of his own 
tongue, or with the special philologies of the cognate lan- 
guages. The comparison of his autobiography, Dichtung und 
Wahrheit, in which his style reached perhaps its culminating 

point, with the best writers of antiquity, will show few paral- 

# 

lelisms in any thing that can be said to be purely indicative 
of classical learning. The works of Goethe, in which critics, 
unacquainted with his literary biography, would find the 
strongest internal evidence of a great knowledge of foreign 
philology and literature, would probably be the Oriental 
poems in the West-Oestlicher Divan, and his Slavic imita- 
tions. Yet I believe it is quite certain that he knew nothing 
of Arabic and Persian, or of the Slavonic languages. He had 
formed his acquaintance with the characteristics of those 



79 

literatures only from translations and critical discussions, and 
his reproduction of their poetry in his native German was not 
a proof of linguistic learning, but it was the exercise of a 
genius above learning, of a power that divined and appropri- 
ated the spirit of compositions, to the comprehension of which 
other men attain only by a critical study of the letter. I 
might, therefore, confidently rely on the works of Goethe 
himself, as a test example in refutation of the theory which 
ascribes such value to linguistic pursuits. All literature is 
full of similar instances, and there is scarcely a nation which 
boasts a written speech, that cannot produce writers of the 
highest rank, so far as respects force, accuracy, and purity of 
diction, whose knowledge of language was confined to their 
mother-tongue. The measure of our knowledge of a par- 
ticular art is the ability to use it, and he who most aptly says 
that which he has to say has given the best evidence, that he 
possesses, in full measure, what is appropriately called knowl- 
edge of the tongue he employs. To can and to Teen or know 
are, both in German and English, associate ideas and related 
words, and in all that belongs to human language, as in most 
other fields of thought and action, knowledge is power, and 
power is knowledge. 

At the most flourishing period of ancient Grecian litera- 
ture, the Greeks had developed no grammatical system, nor 
is there any satisfactory evidence, internal or external, that 
written rules for the use of their language then existed. All 
this was the work of later ages. In no era of their literary 
history, did they produce critical treatises which exhibit a 
sound theoretical acquaintance with the principles of general 
grammar, and their etymological researches were never any 
thing but absolute! v puerile The great writers of Greece, aa 



80 STYLE OF THUCYDIDES. 

there is every reason to believe, were, in general, wholly 
ignorant of any speech but the common tongue of the Hel- 
lenic nation, and yet no literature can exhibit more marked 
examples, not merely of high intellectual culture and power, 
but of the most consummate dexterity in the choice and col- 
location of words, in the adaptation of style and vocabulary 
to the subject, or a more delicate sense of fitness and propriety 
in determining when to conform to the laws of rigorous gram- 
matical concord, and when to rise above them ; when to give 
full expression to every word that could modify the thought 
to the mind of the listener, and when to electrify him by bold 
ellipsis and sudden transition. The mightiest master of words 
the world ever knew was Demosthenes, who certainly was 
acquainted with no language but Greek, and who built his 
own magic style on the foundation of Thucydides, a writer 
most remarkable for his independence of all that was arbi- 
trary, all that was formal, and all that was conventional in 
the dialect of his country and his time. 

The education of this greatest of historical writers was 
purely Hellenic. No study of old Pelasgic, or Egyptian, or 
Phoenician, or Persian, had taught him any thing of the re- 
mote analogies and primitive etymologies of the Attic speech, 
nor could his principles of literary composition have been 
deduced from grammatical or rhetorical precepts, but the un- 
tutored expression of his native genius spontaneously shaped 
itself into the style, which has made his great work what he 
prophetically hoped, a KTrj/ma is aei, a perpetual possession for 
a!2 coming ages. 

The frequency of obvious etymologies in Greek, it may 
be thought, would serve to a native the same purpose as the 
Btudy of foreign tongues to us, who speak a language of so 



ETYMOLOGY OF COMPOUNDS. 81 

mixed a character. But there is a large proportion of the 
Greek vocabulary whose derivation is very obscure, and 
though the perpetual habit of forming words at will must 
have drawn the attention of the Greeks to the composite 
character of their vocables, and to the sources of figurative 
and abstract words, and of terms of art drawn from humble 
and familiar roots, yet such speculations do not seem to have 
been systematically followed, nor does the manner in which 
Greek authors use established compoimds often betray any 
consciousness of their origiu. 

The etymology of words compounded of very familiar 
roots will no doubt often occur to those w T ho use them. The 
word steam-boat is very apt to suggest the notion of the 
agency by which such vessels are propelled, and the boy who 
asks for ginger-bread, the ambrosial cate of rustic life, is 
reminded by its very name of the characteristic ingredient 
which enters into the composition of that delicacy. But long 
use deadens us to the susceptibility of such images, and if 
the source of a word is in the least unfamiliar, it habitually 
passes unnoticed. I have heard a distinguished poet say that 
the Latin imago first suggested itself to him as the root of 
the English word imagination, when, after having been ten 
years a versifier, he was asked by a friend to define this most 
important term in the critical vocabulary of his art. 

To come down to later times, and a remote but cognate 
people, we find in the early literature of Iceland a historical 
work of uncertain authorship, but probably of the twelfth 
century, entitled Njala, the saga or biography of Njall, a 
work betraying no evidence of classical or other foreign lin- 
guistic knowledge, and most certainly bearing no analogy to 
any known model of composition in any other language, bwt 



82 EDUCATION OF SHAKESPEARE. 

which, as an example of pure stylistic excellence, may fairly 
be pronounced altogether unsurpassed by any existing monu 
ment in the narrative department of any literature ancient 
or modern. 

Scarcely less conclusive on this point is the example of 
Shakespeare. We cannot indeed positively deny that the 
great dramatist had enjoyed a partial scholastic training, yet 
on the other hand there is no extraneous proof that he pos- 
sessed any foreign linguistic attainment, and the attempt to 
infer his classical education from the internal evidence of his 
works is simply a begging of the question. It has been ar- 
gued that Shakespeare was a classical scholar, because Ben 
Jonson says he possessed " small Latin and less Greek," 
while another contemporary ascribes to him " little Latin and 
no Greek," Halliwell thinks he certainly knew Italian, be- 
cause Manningham compares Twelfth Night to an Italian 
play called Inganni. But such proofs as these are even 
feebler than those by which it has been attempted to convict 
him of deer-stealing, or to show, now that he was a cabin-boy, 
now an incipient Lord Chancellor. So far as concerns the 
facts of ancient and modern European history and biography, 
we know that the English reader had, through translations, 
abundant means of access to all the information on these 
points which Shakespeare displays, and in an age when 
prominent writers affected Latinism in style, classical turns 
of expression were too common in English to need to be 
sought in the dead languages alone. The supposition of such 
a scholastic training, as even a very moderate acquaintance 
with Latin alone implies, is at variance with the known facts 
of bhakespeare's history, and it is highly improbable that 
a, young man of his country and social condition, who mar- 



SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 06 

ried and entered upon the duties and cares of active life 
at the age of eighteen, could have acquired such an amount 
of philological learning as perceptibly to affect his style and 
his command of the resources of his native tongue. We 
are then fairly entitled to class him among the men of one 
speech, until stronger evidence shall be adduced than has 
yet appeared to the contrary. 

Not many English authors have possessed a more attractive 
or more strictly idiomatic style, not many have exhibited a 
wider variety of expression, than Izaak Walton, but Walton 
had no classical learning, and his orthography, hogoe* for 
haut gout, shows that he knew as little of French. Our 
American Franklin formed his remarkable style by the as- 
siduous study of English models, before he had any acquaint- 
ance with other languages, and we have in our own times an 
illustrious example of the possession of an excellent style 
and a very wide command of words, without any philologi- 
cal attainment whatever, except such as can be acquired by 
the study of the English tongue. The late Hugh Miller, to 
whom I refer, had few contemporaneous superiors as a clear, 
forcible, accurate and eloquent writer, and he uses the most 
cumbrous Greek compounds as freely as monosyllabic Eng- 
lish particles. Yet it is certain that he was wholly ignorant 
of all languages but that in which he wrote, and its Northern 
provincial dialects. 

When we consider the wide range of modern intellectual 
pursuits, the immense accumulation of apparently isolated 
but certainly related facts, which the press in its multiplied 
forms of activity is hourly bringing before us, the vast addi 
tions to even our fireside vocabulary from every branch of 

* Compleat Angler, edition of 1653. d. 160. 



84 SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 

natural science, every field of speculative investigation, it is 
easy to perceive that we require many accessory disciplines to 
make us thorough masters even of the dialect of ordinary 
cultivated society. To exemplify : our metaphysical and 
mathematical nomenclatures are, with modified meanings, 
borrowed chiefly from the Latin, our chemical from the 
Greek, and hundreds of words have been introduced from 
the dialects of these studies into the vocabulary of common 
life, often indeed with changes or qualifications of significa- 
tion, but still retaining much of their original value. Now, 
no amount of classical knowledge will enable us to compre- 
hend the meaning attached to most of these words in the 
modern vocabulary. Hydrogen and oxygen, meiooene and 
pleiocene, are modern compounds of Greek roots, but how- 
ever familiar their radicals, these terms would no more ex- 
plain themselves to the intelligence of a Greek, than to an 
unlettered Englishman. Their scientific signification must be 
sought in scientific treatises, and the etymology of such words 
is of no importance as a guide to their meaning, though as a 
remembrancer, it may be of some value.* "We cannot learn 
all words through other words. There is a large and rapidly 
increasing part of all modern vocabularies, which can be 
comprehended only by the observation of nature, scientific 
experiment, in short by the study of things, and therefore 
Goethe might have said, with greater truth, " He that is im 
bued with no scientific culture has no knowledge of his 
mother-tongue. ' ' 

It must, nevertheless, be admitted that a knowledge of 
certain other philologies is a highly useful auxiliary in the 
study of our own. Indeed, so important are such studies, and 

See Lecture ix. 



COMPOSITION DF ENGLISH. bC 

bo few are they who will seriously set themselves about tins 
investigation of the structural laws of the English tongue, 
with such seemingly inadequate helps alone as it offers to fa- 
cilitate the researches of the native inquirer, that in laying 
down general plans of education, a course of foreign philology 
and literature has been usually prescribed, avowedly as a 
means of instruction in English grammar and syntax, rather 
than as an independent discipline. 

There are two languages, which, considered simply as phi- 
lological aids to the student of English, must take precedence, 
the one as having contributed most largely to our vocabulary 
and built up the framework of our speech, the other, both as 
having somewhat influenced the structure of English, and 
as being in itself a sort of embodiment of universal gram- 
mar, a materialization, I might almost say a petrification, of 
the radical principles of articulate language. These are the 
Anglo-Saxon and the Latin tongues. 

When an intelligent foreigner commences the study of 
English, he finds every page sprinkled with words, whose form 
unequivocally betrays a Greek or Latin origin, and he observes 
that these terms are words belonging to the dialect of the 
learned professions, of theological discussion, of criticism, of 
elegant art, of moral and intellectual philosophy, of abstract 
science and of the various branches of natural knowledge. He 
discovers that the words which he recognizes as Greek and 
Latin and French have dropped those inflections which in 
their native use were indispensable to their intelligibility and 
grammatical significance ; that the mutual relatic ns of voca- 
bles and the sense of the English period are much more often 
determined by the position of the words, than by their form, 
and in short that the sentence is built up upon structural 



86 COMPOSITION OF ENGLISH. 

principles wholly alien to th.se of the classical languages, and 
compacted and held together by a class of words either un- 
known or very much less used in those tongues. He finds 
that very many of the native monosyllables are mere deter- 
minatives, particles, auxiliaries, and relatives ; and he can 
hardly fail to infer that all the intellectual part of our speech, 
all that concerns our highest spiritual and temporal interests, 
is of alien birth, and that only the merest machinery of gram- 
mar has been derived from a native source. Further study 
would teach him that he had overrated the importance and 
relative amount of the foreign ingredients ; that many of our 
seemingly insignificant and barbarous consonantal monosyl- 
lables are pregnant with the mightiest thoughts, and alive 
with the deepest feeling ; that the language of the purposes 
and the affections, of the will and of the heart, is genuine 
English-born ; that the dialect of the market and the fireside 
is Anglo-Saxon ; that the vocabulary of the most impressive 
and effective pulpit orators has been almost wholly drawn 
from the same pure source ; that the advocate who would 
coavince the technical judge, or dazzle and confuse the jury, 
speaks Latin ; while he who would touch the better sensibili- 
ties of his audience, or rouse the multitude to vigorous action, 
chooses his words from the native speech of our ancient 
fatherland ; that the domestic tongue is the language of pas- 
sion and persuasion, the foreign, of authority, or of rhetoric 
and debate ; that we may not only frame single sentences, 
but speak for hours, without employing a single imported 
word ; and finally that we possess the entire volume of divine 
revelation in the truest, clearest, aptestform in which human 
ingenuity has made it accessible to modern man, and yet with 
a vocabulary, wherein, saving proper names and terms not in 



SAXON ELEMENT IN ENGLISH. 87 

their nature translatable, scarce seven words in the hundred 
are derived from any foreign source. 

In fact, so complete is the Anglo-Saxon in itself, and so 
much of its original independence is still inherited by the 
modern English, that if we could but recoT er its primitive 
flexibility and plastic power, we might discard the adventi- 
tious aids and ornaments which we have borrowed from the 
heritage of Greece and Rome, supply the place of foreign by 
domestic compounds, and clothe again our thoughts and our 
feelings exclusively in a garb of living, organic, native growth. 

Such then being the relations between Anglo-Saxon and 
modern English, it can need no argument to show that the 
study of our ancient mother-tongue is an important, I may 
say an essential, part of a complete English education, and 
though it is neither possible, nor in any way desirable, to 
reject the alien constituents of the language, and, in a spirit 
of unenlightened and fanatical purism, thoroughly to Angli- 
cize our speech, yet there is abundant reason to hope that we 
may recover and reincorporate into our common Anglican 
dialect many a gem of rich poetic wealth, that now lies buried 
in more forgotten depths than even those of Chaucer's " well 
of English undefiled." 

The value of Anglo-Saxon as a branch of English philol- 
ogy is most familiar in its relations to our etymology, and its 
importance as an auxiliary in the study of English syntax is 
far less obvious, though not less real. But the structure of 
the language is too inartificial to be of much use as an instru- 
ment of grammatical discipline. 

So far as respects English or any other uninnected speech, 
a knowledge of grammar is rather a matter of convenience as a 
nomenclature, a medium of thought and discussion about 



88 STUDY OF GRAMMAR. 

language, than a guide to the actual use of it, and it is aa 
impossible to acquire the complete command of our own 
tongue by the study of grammatical precept, as to learn to 
walk or swim by attending a course of lectures on anatomy. 
I shall show more fully on another occasion,* that when 
language had been, to use an expressive Napoleonism, once 
regimented, and instruction had grown into an art, grammar 
was held with the Greeks, and probably also with the Romans, 
so elementary a discipline, that a certain amount of knowl- 
edge of it was considered a necessary preliminary step 
towards learning to read and write; but in English, grammar 
has little use except to systematize, and make matter of objec- 
tive consideration, the knowledge we have acquired by a very 
different process. It has not been observed in any modern 
literature, that persons devoted chiefly to grammatical studies 
are remarkable for an y peculiar excellence, or even accuracy, 
of style, and the true method of attaining perfection in the use 
of English is the careful study of the actual practice of the 
best writers in the English tongue. 

" Another will say," argues Sir Philip Sidney in his De- 
fence of Poesie, " that English wanteth grammar. Nay, 
truly, it hath that praise that it wants not grammar ; for 
grammar it might have, but needs it not, being so easie in 
itselfe, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, 
genders, moods and tenses, which I think was a piece of the 
tower of Babylon's curse, that a man should be put to schoole 
to learne his mother-tongue. But for the uttering sweetly and 
properly the conceit of the minde, which is the ende of speech, 
that it hath equally with any other tongue in the world.'' 

* See post, Lecture xx. 



ENGLISH GRAMMAR. 89 

The forms of English are so few, its syntax so simple, that 
they are learned by use before the age of commencing scho- 
lastic study, and what remains to be acquired belongs rather 
to the department of rhetoric than of grammar. " Undoubt- 
edly I have found," observes Sidney further, " in divers smal 
learned courtiers a more sound stile than in some possessors 
of learning ; of which I can ghesse no other cause, but that 
the courtier, following that which by practice he findeth 
fittest to nature, therein (though he know it not) doth accord- 
ing to art, though not by art ; where the other using art to 
shew art, and not hide art, (as in these cases he should doe), 
flieth from nature, and indeed abuseth art." 

Upon questions of construction in inflected languages, 
where every thing depends on simple verbal form, appeal is 
made to the sense of sight if the period is written, to that of 
hearing if pronounced, and the meaning is often determined 
by no higher faculties than those concerned in the comparison 
of mere material and sensuous objects. In English, on the 
contrary, although we have fixed laws of position, yet as posi- 
tion does by no means necessarily conform to the order of 
thought, and nothing in the forms indicates the grammatical 
connection of the words, there is a constant intellectual effort 
to detect the purely logical relations of the constituents of the 
period, to consider the words in their essence not in their acci- 
dents, to divine the syntax from the sense, not infer it from 
casual endings, and hence it may be fairly said that the con- 
struction and comprehension of an English sentence demand 
and suppose the exercise of higher mental powers than are 
required for the framing or understanding of a proposition in 
Latin. 

Nevertheless, a clear objective conception and com pre- 



90 GENERAL GRAMMAR. 

hension of the general principles of syntax is very desirable, 
and this can hardly be obtained except by the presentation of 
them in a materialized, and, so to speak, visible shape. To the 
knowledge of grammar as a science, and therefore to a scien- 
tific comprehension of English grammar, as well as of the 
general principles of language, the study of some tongue 
organized with a gross and palpable machinery is requisite, 
and the laws of syntax must be illustrated by exhibiting their 
application in a more tangible form than can be exemplified 
in a language so destitute of inflections, and so simple, and 
consequently so subtle, in its combinations as the English. 

This advantage, or, for it is very doubtful whether it is an 
advantage to those who use the language possessing it, this 
convenience, rather, as an educational engine, is eminently 
characteristic of the Latin. The vocabulary of the Latin is 
neither copious nor precise, its forms are intricate and inflexi- 
ble, and its literature, as compared with that of Greece, 
exhibits the inferiority which belongs to all imitative compo- 
sition. But in the regularity, precision, and distinctness of its 
inflections and structure, it atones for much of the indefinite 
mistiness of its vocables, and it is an admirable linguistic 
machine for the manufacture of the coarser wares of intel 
lectual produce and consumption. For the expression of 
technicalities, the narration of marches and battles, the 
description of sieges and slaughters, the enunciation of posi- 
tive rules of pecuniary right, the promulgation of dictatorial 
ordinances and pontifical bulls, the Latin is eminently fitted. 
Its words are always 

Sic volo, sic jubeo, ste* pro ratione voluntas ; 

and it is almost as much by the imperatonal character of the 



LATIN GRAMMAR. 91 

language itself — the speech of masters, not of men — as by the 
commanding position of the people to whom it was vernacular, 
and of the church which sagaciously adopted it, that it has 
so powerfully influenced the development and the existing 
tendencies of all modem European tongues, even of thoso 
which have borrowed the fewest words from it.* 

The Latin grammar has become a general standard, where- 
with to compare that of all other languages, the medium 
through which all the nations of Christendom have become 
acquainted with the structure and the philosophy of their 
own ; and technical grammar, the mechanical combinations 
of language, can be nowhere else so advantageously studied. 

While then the study of Anglo-Saxon and of the older 

* The power of Rome was a more widely diffused, pervading, and all-inform- 
ing element in the ancient world, than written history alone would authorize us 
to infer, and we find traces of her language, as well as amazing evidences of her 
material greatness and splendor in provinces which we should scarcely otherwise 
know that her legions had overrun. Not Roman coins only, which commerce 
might have borne farther than her eagles ever flew, but fortified camps, forums, 
roads, temples, inscriptions, throughout almost the whole Mediterranean basin 
as well as the Atlantic slope of the Eastern continent, everywhere attest her 
power, while palaces, theatres, aqueducts, baths, buried statues and scattered 
gems, prove that her taste and luxury had spread from the banks of the Elbe 
to the sands of the Libyan Desert. The presence, however, of remains of the 
Latin language and of Koman art is not always to be regarded as proof of the 
actual subjugation of the countries where such relics are found. With the 
view partly of familiarizing those whose conquest she meditated with her laws, 
institutions, and manners, and thus preparing them for the yoke they were des- 
tined to wear, and partly of facilitating such conquests by demoralizing the 
scions of royal and noble families, whose claim upon the loyal attachment of 
their people was one of the great barriers against the extension of her sway, it 
was the policy of Rome to train up at the capital, either as hostages or as national 
guests, as many foreign princes and other high-born youths as could be gathered 
from dependent and allied countries. Returning to their fatherland, they car* 
ried with them the speech, the arts, aid often the artisans of their proud nurse, 
and thus many existing remains, of apparently Roman architecture, are doubt- 
less imitations of Roman buildings, erected by native potentates who had ac 
quired a taste for Roman life on the banks of the Tiber. 



92 MiESOGOTHIC. 

literature of English itself promises the most abundant bar- 
vest of information with respect to the etymology of the fun- 
damental part of our present speech, and an inexhaustible 
mine of material for the further enrichment of our native 
tongue, we must, in spite of the close analogy between the 
syntax of primitive and modern English, and the great diver- 
sity between that of the latter and of Latin, still turn to the 
speech and literature of Home, as the great source of scientific 
grammatical instruction. 

The Mceso-Gothic, both intrinsically, and as being the 
earliest form in which considerable remains of any dialect 
cognate with our own have come down to us, is of much 
philological interest and importance. There are extant in 
Mceso-Gothic a large proportion of a translation of the 
gospels and epistles by Ulphilas, a semi-Arian bishop of that 
nation in the fourth century, portions of commentaries on 
different parts of the New Testament, and only some other 
less important fragments. 

It is a point of dispute how far any of the later Teutonic 
dialects can claim direct descent from the Mceso-Gothic, but 
it is certain that it is very closely allied to all of them, and 
scarcely any modern Germanic forms are too diverse from 
that ancient tongue to have been derived from it. In variety 
of inflection, and power of derivation and composition, in 
the possession of a dual and of certain passive forms, and in 
abundance of radical words, an inexhaustible material for 
development and culture, the Mceso-Gothic bears a certain 
resemblance to the Greek, while on the other hand, it is iden- 
tified as a Germanic speech, by the character of its radicals, 
almost all of which yet exist in the Teutonic languages, by 
its want of any verbal tenses but the present and the past, 



GOTHIC LANGUAGES. 93 

by the co-existence of a very complete sys.em of vowel- 
clianges in a strong, with a well-marked weak, order of in 
flection, and by general syntactical principles.* 

The Scandinavian languages, the Swedish and Danish, 
and especially their common mother the Icelandic or Old- 
Northern, the Frisic, which, in some of its great multitude 
of dialects, perhaps more than any other language resembles 
the English, the Dutch, and the German, particularly in the 
Platt-Deutsch or low German forms, are all of value to the 
thorough etymological and grammatical study of our native 
tongue. 

They are important, not so much as having largely con- 
tributed to the vocabulary, or greatly influenced the gram- 
matical structure of English, but because in the poverty of 
accessible remains of Anglo-Saxon literature in different and 
especially in early stages of linguistic development, we do 
not possess satisfactory means of fully tracing the history of 
the Gothic portion of our language. There are very many 
English words and phrases, whose forms show them to be 
Saxon, but which do not occur in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. 
These may generally be explained or elucidated by reference 
to the sister-tongues, and consequently some knowledge of 
them is almost as useful to the English student as Anglo- 
Saxon itself. I should unhesitatingly place the Icelandic at 
the head of these subsidiary philologies, because, from its 

* It is a question of curious interest whether those Crimean Goths, whom 
the Austrian ambassador, Busbequius, saw at Constantinople about the middle 
of the sixteenth century, and of whose vocabulary he has given us some scanty 
specimens in his fourth letter, were of Moeso-Gothic dcscer.t. It is difficult to 
account for their presence in that locality upon any other supposition, but the 
few words of their language left us by Busbequius do not enable us positively 
to determine to what branch of the Gothic stock their linguistic affinities would 
point. 



94 IMPOKTANCE pF FRENCH. 

close relationship to Anglo-Saxon, it furnishes more abundan 
analogies for the illustration of obscure English etymological 
and syntactical forms than any other of the cognate tongues.* 
It is but recently that the great value of Icelandic philology 
has become known to the other branches of the Gothic stock, 
and one familiar with the treasures of that remarkable liter- 
ature, and the wealth, power, and flexibility of the lan- 
guage which embodies it, sees occasion to regret the want of 
a thorough knowledge of it in English and American gram- 
matical writers, more frequently than of any other attain- 
ment whatever. 

French, of course, is of cardinal importance, both with 
reference to the history of our grammatical inflections, and 
as having contributed, though chiefly as a conduit, much 
more largely to our vocabulary than any other foreign source. 
The English words usually referred to a Latin original, have, 
in a large majority of cases, come to us through the French, 
and we have taken them with the modifications of orthogra- 
phy and meaning which our Norman neighbors had impressed 

* English philologists formerly ascribed perhaps too much to the Scandina- 
vian Gothic as an element in the structure and composition of Anglo-Saxon, 
and more recent inquirers have erred as widely, in denying that early English 
was sensibly modified by the same influence. The dialects of Northern England, 
where the population partakes in greater proportion of Danish blood, show a 
large infusion of Scandinavian words and forms, and many of these have be- 
come incorporated into the general speech of Britain. The written Anglo- 
Saxon and Old-Northern certainly do not resemble each other so closely as to 
render it probable that they could have been mutually intelligible to those who 
spoke them ; and we find that by the old Icelandic law the representatives of 
Englishmen dyiug in Iceland were expressly excluded from the right of inherit- 
ance, as foreigners, of an unknown speech, beir menn er menn kunna 
eigi her mali edr tungu vid". At the same time, it appears abundantly 
from the sagas that the Old-Northern was well understood among the higher 
circles in England, and the Icelandic skalds or bards were specially welcome at 
;he English court. 



STUDY OF GREEK. 95 

upon them. The syntax of English, in iis best estate, has 
been little affected by French influence, and few grammatical 
combinations of Romance origin have been permanently 
approved and employed by good English writers. Every 
Gallicism in syntax is presumably a corruption ; but Norman 
French itself, as known to our ancestors, had been much 
modified by an infusion of the Scandinavian element, and 
therefore, forms of speech which we have borrowed from the 
French are sometimes referable, in the last resort, to a Gothic 
source. 

I cannot speak of even Greek as being of any such value 
in reference to English grammar or etymology, as to make its 
acquisition a well-spent labor, unless it is pursued for other 
purposes than those of domestic philology. But that I may 
not be misunderstood, let me repeat that so far from dissuad- 
ing from the study of Greek as a branch of general educa- 
tion, I do but echo the universal opinion of all persons com- 
petent to pronounce on the subject, in expressing my own 
conviction that the language and literature of ancient Greece 
constitute the most efficient instrument of mental training 
ever enjoyed by man ; and that a familiarity with that won- 
derful speech, its poetry, its philosophy, its eloquence, and the 
history it embalms, is incomparably the most valuable of in- 
tellectual possessions. The grammar of the Greek language 
is much more flexible, more tolerant of aberration, less rigid 
: n its requirements, than the Latin. The varium et mu- 
a b i 1 e semper f e m i n a, of the Latin poet, for example, is 
so rare an instance of apparent want of concord, that it star 
ties us as abnormal, while similar, and even wider grammat- 
ical discrepancies, are of constant occurrence in Greek. The 
precision, which the regularity of Latin syntax gives to a 



96 ANCIENT SANSCRIT. 

period, the Greek more completely and clearly accomplishes 
by the nicety with which individual words are denned in 
meaning ; and while the Latin trains us to be good gramma- 
rians, the Greek elevates ns to the highest dignity of manhood, 
by making ns acute and powerful thinkers. 

Nothing could well have been more surprising than the 
discovery that the ancient Sanscrit exhibits unequivocal evi- 
dence of close relationship to the Greek and Latin, as well as 
to the modern Romance and the Gothic languages, in both 
grammar and vocabulary, and these analogies have served to 
establish a general alliance between a great number of tongues 
formerly supposed to be wholly unrelated. When linguistic 
science shall be farther advanced, the Sanscrit will probably 
in a great measure supersede the Latin as the common stand- 
ard of grammatical comparison among the European tongues, 
with the additional advantage of standing much more nearly 
in one relation both to the Gothic and the Eomance dialects. 
But at present, Sanscrit is accessible only to the fewest, and 
the English student can hardly be advised, as a general rule, 
to look beyond the sources from which our maternal speech 
is directly derived, for illustrations either of its grammar or 
vocabulary. With respect to verbal forms, and points of 
grammatical structure not sufficiently explained by Anglo- 
Saxon, Latin, and French inflection and syntax, it may in 
general be said, that any one of the Gothic dialects will sup- 
ply the deficiency, and if the inquirer's objects be limited to 
the actual use of his own tongue, the study of English authors 
is a better and safer guide than any wider researches in for- 
eign philologies. 



LECTURE V. 

•TUDY OF EAKLY ENGLISH. 

The systematic study of the mother-tongue, like that of 
all branches of knowledge which we acquire, to a sufficient 
extent for ordinary practical purposes, without study, is nat- 
urally very generally neglected. It is but lately that the 
English language has formed a part of the regular course of 
instruction at any of our higher seminaries, nor has it been 
made the subject of as zealous and thorough philological in- 
vestigation by professed scholars, as the German, the French, 
or some other living languages. It is a matter of doubt 
how far we are aided in acquiring the mastery of any spoken 
tongue by the study of scientific treatises ; but however this 
may be, it is only very recently that we have had any really 
scientific treatises on the subject, any grammar which has at- 
tempted to serve at once as a philosophical exposition of the 
principles, and a guide to the actual employment of the Eng- 
lish tongue. The complete history of the language, the char- 
acterization of its periods, the critical elucidation of its suc- 
cessive changes, the full exhibition of its immediate and 
certain foreign relations, as distinguished from its remote and 
t 



98 DIFFICULTY OF ENGLISH. 

presumptive affinities, has never, to my knowledge, been 
undertaken.* While, therefore, for class instruction, and for 
many purposes of private study, there is no lack of text-books 
and other critical helps, yet a historical knowledge of English 
must be acquired by observing its use and action, as the living 
speech of the Anglican race in different centuries, not as its 
organization is demonstrated in the dissecting-room of the 
grammarian. 

English is generally reputed to be among the more diffi- 
cult of the great European languages, but it is hard for a 
native to say how far this opinion is well founded. The com- 
parison of our own tongue with a foreign speech is attended 
with a good deal of difficulty. Particular phrases and con- 
structions, of course, are easily enough set off against each 
other, but the general movement of our maternal language is 
too much a matter of unconscious, spontaneous action to be 
easily made objective, and, on the other hand, in foreign 
tongues we are too much absorbed in the individual phenom- 
ena to be able to grasp the whole field. The enginery of the 
one is too near, the idiomatic motive power of the other too 
distant, for distinct vision. But I am inclined to the belief, 
that English is more difficult than most of the Continental 
languages, at least as a spoken tongue, for I think it is cer- 
tain that fewer natives speak it with elegance and accuracy, 
if indeed violations of grammatical propriety are not more 
frequent among the best English writers, and it sometimes 

* I am certainly not blind to the great importance and utility of the works 
of Latham, Fowler, Brown, and other learned and laborious inquirers into the 
facts and theory of English Grammar, but the consideration of their merits does 
not come within the scope of these lectures, the object of which is to recom- 
mend and enforce the study of English, not at second hand or through the me* 
dium of precept, but by a direct acquaintance with the great monuments of 
its literature. 



ENGLISH INCORRECTLY SPOKEN. 90 

happens that persons exact in the use of individual words are 
lax in the application of rules of syntactical construction. A 
distinguished British scholar of the last century said he had 
known but three of his countrymen who spoke their native 
language with uniform grammatical accuracy, and the obser- 
vation of most persons widely acquainted with English and 
American society confirms the general truth implied in this 
declaration. Courier is equally severe upon the French. 
" There are," says that lively writer, " five or six persons in 
Europe who know Greek ; those who know French are much 
fewer." Prima facie, irregular as English is, we should ex- 
pect it to be at least as correctly spoken as French, because 
the number of unrelated philological facts, of exceptions to 
what are said to be general rules, of anomalous and conven- 
tional phrases, is greater in the latter than in the former ; but 
the proportion of good speakers, or rather of good talkers, is 
certainly larger among the French than among the English 
or Americans. It is interesting to observe how much value 
has been attached to purity of dialect in some of the less 
known countries of Europe. The grand old Catalan chron- 
icler, Ramon Muntaner, who wrote about the year 1325, 
himself no book-worm, but a veteran warrior, often con- 
cludes his eulogiums of his heroes with a compliment to 
the propriety and elegance with which they spoke his native 
tongue, and he gives an interesting account of the means by 
which two of the nobility arrived at such perfection of speech. 
" And this same Syr Corral Llanca became one of the fayrest 
menne in the world, and best langaged and sagest, insomuch 
that as at that tyme menne saide, the finest Cathalan in the 
worlde was hys and Syr Roger de Luna's ; and no mervaile, 
for as yee have harde before, they came ryght yonge into 



100 DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 

Cathalonye and were norysshed there, and in alle the good 
townes of Cathalonie and of the reaume of Valence whatso- 
ever seemed to them choyce and faire langage, they dyd 
their endeavonre to learne the same. And so eche of hem 
was a more parfyt Cathalonian than alle other, and spake the 
fayrest Cathalan." * 

The systematic cultivation of the modern Continental lan- 
guages began much earlier than that of English. They had 
generally advanced to a high degree of development, and 
acquired the characteristic grammatical features which now 
distinguish them, at a period when even the most polished of 
the English dialects was but a patois. Several of them in- 
deed had produced original works in both poetry and prose, 
which still rank among the master-pieces of modern genius, 
before Anglo-Norman England had given birth to a single 
composition which yet maintains an acknowledged place in 
the literature of the nation. Although the Icelandic can 
hardly be called a modern language, yet it possesses, besides 
the poems and traditions of the heathen era, an original mod- 
ern literature modified by the same general Christian in- 
fluences which have colored all the recent mental efforts of 
Europe. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced in 
that remote island poems of remarkable merit, and prose 
compositions which have no superiors in the narrative litera- 
ture of any age. The Eibelungen Lied, the great epic of Ger- 



* "E aquest en Corral Llanca exi hu dells bells homens del mon, e mills par- 
Fant e pus saui, si que en aquell temps se deya, quel pus bell cathalaneseh del 
mon era dell e del dit en Roger de Luria ; e no era marauella, que ells, axi com 
dauant vos he dit, vengren molt fadrins en Cathalunya, e nudrirense de cascun 
Uoch de Cathalunya e del regne de Valencia tot 90 que bo ne bell parlar loa 
paria ells aprengueren. E axi cascu dells fo lo pus perfet Cathala que negun 
litre, e ab pus bell cathalaneseh." — Ramon Muntaner, 15G2, cap. xviii 



DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH. 101 

many, dates probably as far back as the year twelve hundred, 
Castilian, Catalan, Provenzal and French genius had already 
embodied themselves in poetic forms, which determined the 
character of the subsequent literatures of those languages, 
before the close of the thirteenth century, and the commence- 
ment of the fourteenth was marked by the appearance of 
Dante's great work, which still stands almost alone in the 
poetry, not of Italy only, but of modern Europe. 

The later origin of English literature is to be ascribed 
partly to the fact that England, from its insular position, was 
less open to the exciting causes which roused to action the 
intellect of the continent, but chiefly, no doubt, to the condi- 
tion of the language itself. The tongues of Iceland, of Ger- 
many, of Italy, of Spain, and in a less degree of France also, 
were substantially homogeneous in their etymology and struc- 
ture, and the separate dialects of each stock, Gothic and Ro- 
mance, were closely enough allied to facilitate the study of 
all of them to those to whom any one was vernacular, and 
thus to secure to them a great reciprocal philological and lit- 
erary influence. The countries to which they belonged were 
also territorially and politically more or less connected, and 
thus an unbroken chain of social and literary action and re- 
action extended from the Arctic ocean to the Mediterranean. 

English, on the contrary, was not only a composite speech, 
but built up of very discordant ingredients, and spoken in 
an isolated locality. The British islands had no relations of 
commerce or politics with any country but Northern and 
Western France, and the comparatively unimportant Nether- 
land provinces. A longer period was naturally required for 
the assimilation of the constituents of the lansruase, and for 
the action of the influences which, before that assimilation 



102 DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH. 

was completed, had already created the literatures of the Con- 
tinental nations. In a country ruled by Norman princes, all 
governmental and aristocratic influences were unfavorable to 
the cultivation of the native speech, and the growth of a 
national literature. The Romish church, too, in England, as 
everywhere else, was hostile to all intellectual effort which 
in any degree diverged from the path marked out by ecclesi- 
astical habit and tradition, and. very many important English 
benefices were held by foreign priests quite ignorant of the 
English tongue. Robert of Gloucester, who flourished about 
two hundred years after the conquest, says : 

Wyllam, pys noble due, po he adde ydo al pys, 

f>en wey he nome to Londone he & al hys 

As kyng & prince of lond, wyp nobleye ynou. 

Agen hym wyp vayre processyon pat folc of town drou, 

And vnderuonge hym vayre ynou, as kyng of pys lond. 

pus come lo ! Engelond into Normannes honde, 

And pe Normans ne coupe speke po bote her owe speche, 

And speke French as dude atom & here chyldren dude al so teche. 

So pat heymen of pys lond, pat of her blod come, 

Holdep alle pulke speche, pat hii of hem nome. 

Vor bote a man coupe French, me tolp of hym wel lute. 

Ac lowe men holdep to Englyss, & to her kunde speche yute. 

Ich wene per ne be man in world contreyes none, 

pat ne holdep to her kunde speche, bote Engelond one, 

Ac wol me wot vorto conne bothe wel yt ys 

Vor be more pat a man con, pe more worp he ys.* , 

And in the following century, as we learn from an old chron- 
icler, " John Cornewaile, a maister of grammar, changed the 
lore in grammar scole, and construction, of Frenche into Eng- 
lische : so that now, the year of our Lord a thousand three 
hundred and 4 score and five, and of the seconde Kyng Rich- 
ard after the conquest nyne, in alle the grammar scoles of 

* Robert of Gloucester, p. 364. 



DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH. 103 

Engelond children leveth Frensche, and construeth and 
Jerneth on Englische." 

Under such circumstances, it is by no means strange, that 
the progress of the language and literature of England should 
have been slow, and it is rather matter of surprise that tin 
fourteenth century should have left so noble monuments of 
English genius, than that the literary memorials of that era 
should be so few. But, although the long reign of Edward 
III. was as remarkable for the splendid first-fruits of a great 
national literature as for its political and martial triumphs 
and reverses, the language was not at that time sufficiently 
cleared of dialectic confusion, and sufficiently settled in its 
forms and syntax, to admit of grammatical and critical treat- 
ment, as a distinctly organized speech. "While, therefore, the 
thirteenth century produced in Iceland a learned and com- 
plete treatise on the poetic art as suited to the genius of the 
Old-Northern tongue,* and Jacme March, a contemporary of 
Chaucer, had composed a Catalan vocabulary and dictionary 
of rhymes, with metrical precepts and examples, the English 
had not even a dictionary or grammar, still less critical trea- 
tises, until a much later period. It will be evident from all 
this, that the remains of the English speech, in its earliest 
forms, as a literary medium, must be relatively few, and that 
it is by no means easy to trace the progress of changes which 
ended in the substitution of our present piebald dialect for 
the comparatively homogeneous and consistent Saxon tongue. 
A language which exists, for centuries, only as the jargon of 
an unlettered peasantry and a despised race, will preserve but 
few memorials of its ages of humiliation, and as I have be- 
fore noticed, the indifference with which English philology 

* The prose Edda, or Edda of Suorri Sturluson. 



104 DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH. 

b$& been hitherto too generally regarded has suffered to per- 
ish, or still withholds from the public eye, a vast amount of 
material which might have been employed for the elucidation 
of many points of great historical, literary, and linguistic 
interest. Halliwell's Dictionary, containing more than fifty 
thousand archaic and provincial words and obsolete forms, is 
illustrated with citations drawn in the largest proportion from 
unpublished manuscript authorities, and it is evident from the 
titles of the works quoted and the character of the extracts, 
as well as from the testimony of scholars, that many of them 
must be of very great philological value.* 

* Until very lately, the modernization of every reprint of an English classic 
was almost as much a settled practice as the adoption of a fashionable style of 
binding. Dryden, Pope, and Wordsworth have not scrupled to lay a profane 
hand upon Chaucer, a mightier genius than either, and Milton is not allowed to 
appear in the orthography which he deliberately and systematically employed. 
Archbishop Parker was so zealous for the preservation, or rather the restora- 
tion, of ancient forms, that he printed even the Latin of Asser's life of Alfred 
in the Anglo-Saxon character. The association which takes its name from 
Parker, in republishing the English theological writings of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, a series extending to more than fifty volumes, and which, unmutilated, 
would have been invaluable as a treasure of genuine, primitive, nervous English, 
has clipped and restamped the whole in such a manner as to deprive these 
works of all their interest, except for professional theological inquirers, and 
very greatly to diminish their value even for them. The recently-discovered 
manuscript of the Earl of Devonshire's translation of Paleario's Treatise on the 
Benefits of Christ's Death is evidently a copy made by an ignorant transcriber, and 
its orthography is extremely incorrect and variable. In preparing it for the 
press, it was, unfortunately, deemed expedient to reform the spelling, for the 
sake of making it more uniform and intelligible, as well as correct, and the task 
has been executed with great care, and in as good faith as the erroneous prin- 
ciple adopted would admit of. As a frontispiece, a fac-simile of one of the very 
email pages of the manuscript is given, containing eighteen lines, or about one 
hundred and twenty-five words. In printing the text of this page, the editor 
has omitted a comma in the seventh line, and thereby changed, or, at least, ob- 
scured, the meaning of a very important and very clear passage, which contained 
the marrow of the whole treatise. Of course, any departure from the letter in 
a weighty period, unless it is supposed to be a mere typographical accident 
destroys the confidence of critical readers in the edition, and the book, in a 
grammatical point of view, becomes worthless. The manuscript in question ia 



VOCABULARY OF ENGLISH. 105 

I have already sufficiently stated my reasons for believing 
thrtt a colloquial or grammatical knowledge of other tongues 
is not essential to the comprehension and use of our own, and, 
considered solely as a means to that end, without reference 
to the immense value of classical and modern Continental 
literature as the most powerful of all instruments of general 
culture, I have no doubt whatever that the study of the Greek 
and Latin languages might be advantageously replaced by 
that of the Anglo-Saxon and primitive English. An over- 
whelming proportion of the words which make up our daily 
speech is drawn from Anglo-Saxon roots, and our syntax is as 
distinctly and as generally to be traced to the same source. 
We are not then to regard the ancient Anglican speech as in 
any sense a foreign tongue, but rather as an older form of 
our own, wherein we may find direct and clear explanation 
of many grammatical peculiarities of modern English, which 
the study of the Continental languages, ancient or modern, 
can but imperfectly elucidate. With reference to etymology, 
the importance of the Anglo-Saxon is too obvious to require 
argument. It is fair to admit, however, that the etymology 
of compound w r ords, and of abstract and figurative terms, 
must in general be sought elsewhere, Tor we have borrowed 
our scientific, metaphysical, and sesthetical phraseology from 
other sources, while the vocabulary of our material life is al- 
most wholly of native growth. In determining the significa- 
tion of words, modern usage is as b'nding an authority as 
ancient practice, inasmuch as, at presf at, we know no ground 
but use for either the old meaning or the new ; but a knowl- 

one of the most important recent acquisitions to the theology of the Reforma- 
tion and the early literature of England, and the voluntary admission of any 
changes in its text shows a want of exact scholarship in a quarter where w« 
tad the best right to expect it. 



JOG FORMS OF EARLY ENGLISH. 

edge of the primitive sense of a word very often enables us 
to discover a force and fitness in its modern applications which 
we had never suspected before, and accordingly to employ 
it with greater propriety and appositeness. The most in- 
structive and impressive etymologies are those which are 
pursued within the limits of our own tongue. The native 
word at every change of form and meaning exhibits new do- 
mestic relations, and suggests a hundred sources of collateral 
inquiry and illustration, while the foreign root connects itself 
with our philology only by remote and often doubtful analo- 
gies, and when it enters our language, it comes usually in a 
fixed form, and with a settled meaning, neither of which 
admits of further development, and of course the word has no 
longer a history. 

The knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is important as a correc- 
tive of the philological errors into which we may be led by 
the study of early English, and especially of popular ballad 
and other poetry, without such a guide. The introduction of 
Norman French, with a multitude of words inflected in the 
weak or augmentative manner, naturally confused what was 
sufficiently intricate and uncertain before, the strong inflec- 
tion, or that by the letter-change, in the Anglo-Saxon. The 
range of letter-change in Anglo-Saxon grammar was indeed 
wide, but not endless or arbitrary. It however became so, at 
least in the poetic dialect, as soon as Norman influence had 
taught English bards independence of the laws of Saxon 
grammar. Many of the barbarous forms so freely used in 
popular verse are neither obsolete conjugations revived, nor 
dialectic peculiarities, but creations of the rhymesters who 
employed them, coin not uncurrent merely, but counterfeit 
and without either the stamp or the ring of the genuine 



FORMS OF EARLY ENGLISH. 107 

metal. The balladmongers of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries concerned themselves as little about a vowel as the 
Orientals, and where the convenience of rhyme or metre re- 
cpired a heroic license, they needed only the consonants of 
one syllable of a genuine root as a stock whereon to grow 
any conceivable variety of termination. Although they did 
not hesitate to conjugate a weak verb with a strong inflection, 
or to reverse the process, thus adding or subtracting syllables 
at pleasure, yet their boldest liberties were with the letter- 
change in the strong inflection. We cannot indeed hold them 
guilty of corrupting 

the language of the nation 
With long-tailed words in -osity and -ation ; 

but we can fairly convict them of making it more desperately 
Gothic in its forms than even the Mceso-Gothic of Ulphilas. 

The confusion into which the English inflections were thus 
thrown combined with other circumstances to discourage the 
attempts of philologists to reduce its accidence to a regular 
system, and English scholars had shown very respectable 
ability in the elucidation of other tongues, before they pro- 
duced any thing that could fairly be called a grammar of 
their own. Analogous causes had prevented the cultivation 
of native philology in Northern France, and though the 
langue d'oc, or Provenzal, was early a matter of careful 
study, the langue d'oil, the only French dialect known 
to the Norman race, possessed no grammar until it was pro- 
vided with one by an Englishman.* 

* The French grammar of Palsgrave, to which I allude, prepared for the use 
of the Princess Mary, sister of King Henry YIIL, and printed in 1530, under the 
title of Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse, is, under the circumstances, 
the most remarkable, if not the most important work, which had appeared in 



108 FOEMS OF EARLY ENGLISH. 

The function of grammar is to teach what is, not what 
ought to be, in language. English, as I have said, was too 
irregular, fluctuating and incongruous in its accidence and 
syntax to be reduced to form and order until the close of the 
sixteenth century, and as its literature was of later origin 
than that of the continent, there was not, before that period, 
a sufficient accumulation of classical authorship to serve as 
illustration and authority in grammatical discussion.* 

modern philology before the commencement of the present century. Although 
it was designed only to teach French grammar, yet, as it is written in English, 
and constantly illustrates the former tongue by comparison with the latter, it is 
hardly a less valuable source of instruction with reference to the native than to 
the foreign language. In the careful reprint lately executed at the expense of 
the French government, it makes a large quarto of 900 pp., more than half of 
which is occupied with comparative tables of words and phrases, so that while 
it is a remarkably complete French grammar, it is much the fullest English dic- 
tionary which existed before the time of Elizabeth. It is also one of the amplest 
collections of English phrases and syntactical combinations which can be found 
at the present day, and at the same time the best authority now extant for the 
pronunciation used in French, and, so far as it goes, in English also, at the 
period when it was written. 

* One of the earliest English grammars which can lay claim to scientific 
merit is the brief compend drawn up by Ben Jonson, and published some time 
after the death of the author. It is too meagre to convey much positive instruc- 
tion, but it exhibits enough of philological insight to excite serious regret for 
the loss of Jonson's complete work, the manuscript of which was destroyed by 
fire. This little treatise throws a good deal of light on the orthoepy of English 
at that period, for the learning and the habitual occupations of Jonson make it 
authoritative on this point, so far as it goes, but there are statements concern- 
ing the accidence, which are not supported by the general usage of the best 
authors, either of Jonson's own time, or of any preceding age of English literature. 
For instance, he lays down the rule that nouns in z, s, sh, g, and ch, make the 
possessive singular in is, and the plural in es, and as an example he cites the 
word prince, (which, by the way, does not end in either of the terminations 
enumerated by him,) and says the possessive case is princes, the plural princes. 
That individual instances of this orthography may be met with, I do not deny, 
but it is certain that it never was the general usage, and Jonson was doubtless 
Suggesting a theory, not declaring a fact, and he introduces the rule rather as 
furnishing an explanation of what he calls the " monstrous syntax," of using the 
pronoun his as the sign of the possessive case, than as a guide to actual practice. 

It is curious that Palsgrave lays down the same rule, though he elsewhere 



DIFFICULTIES OF EARLY ENGI ISH. 109 

The same reasons which deterred early English scholars 
trom laying down rules of grammatical inflection, would ren- 
der it impossible at the present day to construct a regular 
accidence of the forms of the language at any period before 
the writers of the Elizabethan age had established standards 
of conjugation, declension, orthography, and syntax. The 
English student therefore can expect little help from gram- 
marians in mastering the literature of earlier periods, and he 
must learn the system of each great writer by observation of 
his practice. But the inflections in English are so few, that 
the number of possible variations in their form is embraced 
within a very narrow range, and all their discrepancies to- 
gether do not amount to so great a number as the regular 
changes in most other languages. With respect to the vocab- 
ulary, the difficulties are even less. Most good editions of 
old authors are provided with glossaries explaining the obso- 
lete words, and where these are wanting, the dictionaries of 
Narcs, Halliwell, Wright, and others, amply supply the de- 
ficiency. In fact, a mere fraction of the time demanded to 
acquire the most superficial smattering of French or Italian 

contradicts it, and in practice disregards it. " Also where as we seme to have a 
genitvve case, for so moche as, by adding of is to a substantyve, we sygmfye 
possessvon, as, mv maistem gownc, my ladyfe boke, which with us contrevail- 
leth as moche as the gowne of my maister, the boke of my ladye," &c. Intro- 
duction, XL. 

But on page 191, he says: 

"Where we, in our tonge, use to putte a to ov.re substantyves whan wo wyll 
express possession, saying, 'a manncs gowne, a woman [>] hose,' &c, &C., and 
afterward?, 'this is my maistcr.s gowne, he dyd fctte nil inaister.v eloke.' " A. 
similar passage occurs "on page 111, and I have not observed a single instance 
where Palsgrave himself makes the possessive in », except that above quoted 
from page XL., where it is used by way of exemplifying the rule as he states it. 

Alexander Gil's remarkable Logonomia Anglica is interesting rather in an 
erthoopieal, than in a grammatical point of view, and it will be particularly no- 
ticed in a Lecture on orthoepical changes in English, post. 



110 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

will enable the student to obtain such a knowledge of earty 
English, that he can read with facility every thing written in 
the language, from the period when it assumed a distinct 
form to its complete development in the seventeenth century. 
Critical discussions of the literary merit of English au- 
thors would be foreign to the plan of the present course, 
and in noticing writers of different periods, I shall refer 
chiefly to their value as sources of philological instruction. 
First in time, and not least in importance, is the Ormulum, a 
very good edition of which was published in 1852. This is 
a metrical paraphrase of a part of the New Testament, in a 
homiletic form, and it probably belongs to the early part of 
the thirteenth century. Its merit consists mainly in the pur- 
ity of its Saxon-English, very few words of foreign origin 
occurring in it. The uniformity of its orthography, and the 
regularity of its inflections, are far greater than are to be 
found in the poetical compositions even of the best writers of 
the succeeding century. One reason of this is that the un- 
rhymed versification adopted by the author relieved him from 
I he necessity of varying the terminal syllables of his words 
for the sake of rhyme, which led to such anomalous inflec- 
tions in other poetical compositions, and it accordingly ex- 
hibits the language in the most perfect form of which it was 
then capable. In fact, the dialect of the Ormulum is more 
easily mastered than that of Piers Ploughman, which was 
written more than a century later, and it contains fewer 
words of unknown or doubtful signification. It is, moreover, 
especially interesting as a specimen of the character and in- 
derent tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon language as affected by 
more advanced civilization and culture, but still uncorrupted 
by any considerable mixture of foreign ingredients; for we 



EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. Ill 

discover no trnces of the Norman element in the vocabulary, 
and but few in the syntax of this remarkable work.* Piers 
Ploughman, on the contrary, employs Latin and French words 
in quite as lauge a proportion as Chaucer,f although the forms 
and syntax of the latter author are much nearer the modern 
standard. The compliment which Spenser bestows upon Chan 
cer's " Well of English undenled " is indeed well merited, if 
reference be had to the composite character that English as- 
sumed in the best ages of its literature, but it would be more 
iitly applied to the Ormulum, as a repository of the indige- 
nous vocabulary of the Anglican tongue. In any event, no 
student of the works of Chaucer will dispute Spenser's opin- 
ion that 

11 In him the pure well-head of poesy did dwell," 

and it is no extravagant praise to say that the name of Chau- 
cer was the first in English literature, until it was, not 
eclipsed, but surpassed by those of Shakespeare and Milton. 
In the earliest ages of all literature, poetry seems to be 
little more than an artificial arrangement of the dialect of 
common life, but as literary culture advances, both the phrase- 
ology and the grammar of metrical compositions diverge 
from the vulgar speech, and poetry forms a vocabulary and 
a syntax of its own. Although, therefore, the practice of 



* The vocabulary of the Ormulum consists of about twenty-three hundred 
words, exclusive of proper names and inflected forms. Among these I am un« 
able to find a single word of Norman-French origin, and scarcely ten which 
were taken directly from the Latin. The whole number of words of foreign 
etymology previously introduced into Anglo-Saxon, which occur in the Ormu- 
lum, does not exceed sixty, though there is some uncertainty as to the origin 
of several words common to the Latin and the Gothic languages in the earliefcl 
stages in which these latter are known to us. — See Lecture vi. 

f Soc Lecture vi. 



112 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

great poetical writers is authority for their successors, yet it is 
by no means trustworthy evidence as to the actual character 
of the language employed by speakers or prose writers ; and 
this is more emphatically true of the English than of most 
Continental languages, in consequence of the derangement 
of its Sectional system, which I have already noticed. 

The dialect of Chaucer doubtless approaches to the court 
language of his day, but the prose of Wycliffe is more nearly 
the familiar speech of the English heart in the reign of Ed- 
ward III., and the pages of Holinshed more truly reflect the 
living language of Queen Elizabeth's time than tue stanzas 
of Spenser. 

The English prose literature of the fifteenth century con- 
sists, in large proportion, of translations, and these always 
partake more or less of the color of the source from whence 
they were taken. There is, in fact, so little native English 
of that period extant in a printed form, that it is not easy 
to determine how far the prevalence of Gallicisms in the 
translations printed by Caxton is to be ascribed to the influ- 
ence of French originals upon the style of the translator, and 
how far it was a characteristic feature of the language of the 
time. The same remark applies, though with much less force, 
to Lord Berners' admirable translation of Froissart, the two 
volumes of which were published in 1523 and 1525 respec- 
tively ; but this translation is doubtless the best English prose 
style which had yet appeared, and as a specimen of pictur- 
esque narrative, it is excelled by no production of later 
periods. The dramatic character and familiar gossipping 
tone of the original allowed some license of translation, and 
the dialogistic style of the English of Lord Berners is as 
racy and nearly as idiomatic as the French of Froissart. 



ENGLISH OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 113 

Tyndale's translation of the New Testament is the most 
important philological monument of the first half of the six- 
teenth century, perhaps I should say of the whole period be- 
tween Chaucer and Shakespeare, both as a historical relic, 
and as having more than any thing else contributed to shape 
and fix the sacred dialect, and establish the form which the 
Bible must permanently assume in an English dress. The 
best features of the translation of 1611 are derived from the 
version of Tyndale, and thus that remarkable work has ex- 
erted, directly and indirectly, a more powerful influence on 
the English language than any other single production be- 
tween the ages of Kichard II. and Queen Elizabeth.* 

The most important remaining prose works of the six- 
teenth century are the writings of Sir Thomas More,f (which, 
however, with all their excellence, are rather specimens of 
what the language, in its best estate, then was, than actually 
influential models of composition,) and those of Hooker. 
These last, indeed, are not remarkable as originating new 
forms or combinations of words, but they embody nearly 
all the real improvements which had been made, and they 
may be considered as exhibiting a structure of English not 
equalled by the style of any earlier, and scarcely surpassed 
by that of any later writer. 

I shall reserve what I have to say upon the dialect of the 
authorized English version of the Bible for another occasion, 
and it would be superfluous to commend to the study of the 
inquirer such authors as Bacon, and Shakespeare, and Milton. 
There are, however, two or three classes of writers of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries, whose works are much less 
known than their philological importance deserves. First 

* See Lecture xxviii. f See Lecture vi. 

8 



114 ENGLISH OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

are what we must call, in relation to Shakespeare, and only in 
relation to him, the minor dramatists of the period in ques- 
tion. They are valuable, not only as perhaps the best author- 
ities upon the actual spoken dialect of their age, but as gen- 
uine expressions of the character and tendencies of contem- 
poraneous English humanity, and also for the aid they afford 
in the illustration and elucidation of Shakespeare himself, 
whose splendor has so completely filled the horizon of his 
art, that those feebler lights can hardly yet be said to have 
enjoyed the benefit of a heliacal rising. 

Next come the early English translators of the great mon- 
uments of Greek and Roman literature. The reigns of Eliz- 
abeth and James produced a large number of translations of 
classical authors, as for example the Lives and the Morals of 
Plutarch, the Works of Seneca, the History of Livy, the 
Natural History of the Elder Pliny, and other voluminous 
works. These translations are naturally more or less tinc- 
tured with un-English classical idioms, but the vast range of 
subjects discussed in them, especially in Plutarch and Pliny, 
demanded the employment of almost the entire native vocab- 
ulary, and we find in these works exemplifications of numer- 
ous words and phrases which scarcely occur at all in any 
other branch of the literature of that important period. 

Eor the same reasons, the early voyagers and travellers, 
such as the voluminous collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, 
as well as the separately published works of this class, are 
very valuable sources of philological knowledge. Their vo- 
cabularies are very varied and extensive, and they are ren- 
dered especially attractive by the life and fervor which, at a 
period when all that was foreign to Europe was full of won- 
der and mystery, clothed in almost poetic forms the narratives 
df events, and descriptions of scenery and objects, now almost 



ENGLISH OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 115 

too familiar to excite a momentary curiosity. Hakluyt is 
perhaps to be preferred to Purckas, because he allows the 
narrators whose reports he collected to speak for themselves, 
and appears in general to follow the words of the original 
journals more closely than Purchas, who often abridges, or 
otherwise modifies, his authorities. 

The theological productions of the period between the 
reigns of Elizabeth and Anne, however eloquent and power- 
ful, are, simply as philological monuments, less important 
than the secular compositions of the same century, and they 
furnish not many examples of verbal form or combination 
which are not even more happily employed elsewhere. To 
these remarks, however, the works of Fuller are an exception. 
Among the writers of that age, Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne 
come nearest to Shakespeare and Milton in affluence of thought 
and wealth of poetic sentiment and imagery. They are both 
remarkable for a wide range of vocabulary, Fuller inclining 
to a Saxon, Browne to a Latinized diction, and their syntax- 
is marked by the same peculiarities as their nomenclature. 

The interest which attaches to the literature of the eigh- 
teenth century is more properly of a critical and rhetorical 
than of a linguistic character, and, besides, in remarks which 
are rather intended to draw the attention of my hearers to 
unfamiliar than to every-day fields of study, it would be un- 
profitable to discuss the literary importance of Dryden, Pope, 
Swift, Addison, Johnson, Junius, Gibbon, and Burke. 

I must, for similar reasons, refrain from entering upon the 
literature of our own times, and I shall only refer to a single 
author, who has made himself conspicuous as, in certain par- 
ticulars, an exceedingly exact and careful writer. In point 
of thorough knowledge of the meaning, and constant and 



116 WOKKS OF COLERIDGE. 

scrupulous precision in the use, of individual words, I suppose 
Coleridge surpasses all other English writers, of whatever 
period. His works are of great philological value, because 
they compel the reader to a minute study of his nomencla- 
ture, and a nice discrimination between words which he em- 
ploys in allied, but still distinct senses, and they contribute 
more powerfully than the works of any other English author 
to habituate the student to that close observation of the mean- 
ing of words which is essential to precision of thought and 
accuracy of speech. Few writers so often refer to the ety- 
mology of words, as a means of ascertaining, defining, or 
illustrating their meaning, while, at the same time, mere ety- 
mology was not sufficiently a passion with Coleridge to be 
likely to mislead him.* 



* Though Coleridge is a high authority with respect to the meaning of single 
words, his style is by no means an agreeable or even a scrupulously correct one, 
in point of structure and syntax. Among other minor matters I shall notice 
hereafter, (Lecture xxix.,) his improper, or at least very questionable, use of the 
phrase in reaped of, and I will here observe, that in opposition to the practice 
of almost every good writer from the Saxon period to his own, and to the rule 
given by Ben Jonson as well as all later grammarians, he employs the affirmative 
or after the negative alternative neither ; as neither this or that. In this inno- 
vation, he has had few if any followers. Again, he uses both, not exclusively 
as a dual, but as embracing three or more objects. I am aware that in thia 
latter case he had the example of Ascham and some other early authors, but it 
is contrary to the etymological meaning of the word, and to the constant usage 
of the best English writers. I do not think that any of these departures from 
the established construction were accidental. They were attempts at arbitrary 
reform, and though the last of them may be defended on the ground that dual 
forms are purely grammatical subtleties, and ought to be discarded, they will aJl 
probably fail to secure general adoption in English syntax. 



LECTUKE VI. 

SOURCES AND COMPOSITION OF ENGLISH. 

I. 

The heterogeneous character of our vocabulary, and the 
consequent obscurity of its etymology, have been noticed as 
circumstances which impose upon the student of English an 
amount of labor not demanded for the attainment of lan- 
guages whose stock of words is derived, in larger proportion, 
from obvious and familiar roots. I now propose to give some 
account of the sources and composition of the English lan- 
guage. According to the views of many able philologists, 
comparison of grammatical structure is a surer test of radical 
linguistic affinity, than resemblances between the words which 
compose vocabularies. I shall not here discuss the soundness 
of this doctrine, my present object being to display the ac- 
quisitions of the Anglican tongue, and to indicate the quarters 
from which they have been immediately derived, not to point 
out its ethnological relationships. I shall therefore on this 
occasion confine myself to the vocabulary, dismissing inquiry 
into the grammatical character of the language, with the 
simple remark, that it in general corresponds with that of tlio 



118 SOURCES OF VOCABULARY. 

other dialects of the Gothic stock. In structi re, English, 
though shorn of its inflections, is still substantially Anglo- 
Saxon, and it owes much the largest part of its words to the 
same source. 

There are two modes of estimating the relative amount 
of words derived from different sources in a given language. 
The one is to compute the etymological proportions of the 
entire vocabulary, as exhibited in the fullest dictionaries ; the 
other, to observe the proportions in which words of indige- 
nous and of foreign origin respectively occur in actual speech 
and in written literature. Both modes of computation must 
be employed in order to arrive at a just appreciation of the 
vocabulary ; but, for ordinary purposes, the latter method is 
the most important, because words tend to carry their native 
syntax with them, and grammatical structure usually accords 
more nearly with that of the source from which the mass of 
the words in daily use is taken, than with the idiom of lan- 
guages whose contributions to the speech are fewer in num- 
ber and of rarer occurrence. Besides this, all dictionaries 
contain many words which are employed only in special or 
exceptional cases, and which may be regarded as foreign den- 
izens not yet entitled to the rights of full citizenship. At 
the same time, the method in question is a very difficult 
mode of estimation, because, not to speak of the peculiar 
diction of individual writers, every subject, every profession, 
and to some extent, every locality, has its own nomenclature, 
and it is often impossible to decide how far those special vo- 
cabularies can claim to form a part of the general stock. 

Upon the whole, we may say that English, as understood 
and employed by the great majority of those who speak it, 
or, in other words, that portion of the language which is not 



SOURCES OF VOCABULARY. 119 

restricted to particular callings or places, but is common to 
all intelligent natives, is derived from the Anglo-Saxon, the 
Latin, and the French. Neither its vocabulary nor its struc- 
ture possesses any important characteristic features * which 
may not be traced directly to one of these sources, although 
the number of individual words which we have borrowed 
from other quarters is still very considerable. Archdeacon 
Trench makes this general estimate of the relative propor- 
tions between the different elements of English : " Supposo 
the English language to be divided into a hundred parts ; of 
these, to make a rough distribution, sixty would be Saxon, 
thirty would be Latin, including of course the Latin which 
has come to us through the French, five would be Greek ; 
we should then have assigned ninety-five parts, leaving 
the other five, perhaps too large a residue, to be divided 
among all the other languages, from which we have adopted 
isolated words." This estimate, of course, applies to the 
total vocabulary, as contained in the completest dictionaries. 
Sharon Turner gives extracts from fifteen classical English 
authors, beginning with Shakespeare and ending with John- 
son, for the purpose of comparing the proportion of Saxon 
words used by these authors respectively. These extracts 
have often been made a basis for estimates of the proportion of 
English words in actual use derived from foreign sources, but 
they are by no means sufficiently extensive to furnish a safe 
criterion. The extracts consist of only a period or two from 
each author, and few of them extend beyond a hundred words ; 
none of them, I believe, beyond a hundred and fifty. The 

* This general statement must be qualified by the admission that certain 
grammatical forms adopted in Northern England from the Danish colonists 
passed into the literary dialect, and finally became established modes of soeeca 
in English. 



120 ETYMOLOGICAL PROPORTIONS 01 WORDS.' 

results deduced from them are, as would be naturally sup- 
posed, erroneous, but, such as they are, they have been too 
generally adopted to be passed without notice, and they are 
given in a note at the foot of the page.* In order to arrive 



* The most convenient and intelligible method of stating the results is by the 
numerical percentage of words from different sources in the extracts referred to 
in the text ; according to these, — 

Shakespeare uses 85 per cent, of Anglo-Saxon, 15 of other words. 



Milton 


« 


81 


Cowley 


« 


89 


English Bible 


u 


97 


Thomson 


u 


85 


Addison 


u 


83 


Spenser 


l( 


81 


Locke 


" 


80 


Pope 


" 


76 


Young 


(( 


79 


Swift 


(( 


89 


Robertson 


M 


68 


Hume 


" 


65 


Gibbon 


(( 


58 


Johnson 


« 


75 



19 


tt 


11 


(« 


3 


K 


15 


{< 


17 


II 


19 


II 


20 


II 


24 


II 


21 


It 


11 


U 


32 


(( 


35 


(( 


42 


u 


25 


«( 



A comparison of these results, derived from single paragraphs containing from 
sixty or seventy to a hundred and fifty words, with those which I have deduced 
from the examination of different passages from the same and other authors, each 
extending to several thousand words, will show that conclusions based on data so 
insignificant in amount as those given by Turner, are entitled to no confidence 
whatever. The extract from Swift contains ninety words, ten of which, or eleven 
per cent., Turner marks as foreign, leaving eighty-nine per cent, of Anglo- 
Saxon. Now this is a picked sentence, for in the John Bull, as thoroughly Eng- 
lish a performance as any of Swift's works, the foreign words are in the propor 
tion of at least fifteen per cent. ; in his History of the four last years of Queen 
Anne, twenty-eight per cent. ; in his Political Lying, more than thirty per cent. ; 
and in this latter work, many passages of considerable length may be found, 
where the words of foreign etymology amount to forty per cent. On the other 
hand, Ruskin, in his theoretical discussions, often employs twenty-five or even 
thirty per cent, of Latin derivatives, but in the first six periods of the sixth Ex- 
ercise in his Elements of Drawing, containing one hundred and eight words, all 
but two, namely, pale and practice, are Anglo-Saxon. My own comparisons, 
though embracing more than two hundred times the quantity of literary material 
examined by Turner, are still insufficient in variety and amount to establish any 
more precise conclusion than the general one stated in a following page, that 



ETYMOLOGICAL PROPORTIONS .F ENGLISH. 121 

at satisfactory conclusions on this point, more thorough and 
extensive research is necessary. I have subjected much longer 
extracts from several authors to a critical examination, and 
the results I am about to state are in all cases founded, not 
upon average estimates from the comparison of scattered 
passages, but upon actual enumeration.* In writers whose 
style is nearly uniform, I have endeavored to select charac- 
teristic portions as a basis for computation ; in others, whose 
range of subject and variety of expression is wide, I have 
compared their different styles with reference to the effect 
produced upon them by difference of matter and of purpose. 
I have been able to examine the total vocabularies only of 
the Orinuluin, the English Bible, Shakespeare, and the poet- 
ical works of Milton, because these are the only English 
books to which I can find complete verbal indexes. In these 
instances, the comparison of the entire stock of words possess- 
ed, and the proportions habitually used by the writers, is 
full of interest and instruction, and I regret that leisure and 
means were not afforded for making similar inquiries respect- 
ing the vocabularies of a larger number of eminent authors 
near our own time. In all cases, proper names are excluded 
from the estimates, but in computing the etymological pro- 
portions of the words used in the extracts examined, all other 
words, of whatever grammatical class, and all repetitions of 

the authors of the present day use more Anglo-Saxon words, in proportion to 
the whole number known to educated men, than writers of corresponding 
eminence in the last century. 

* I have made no attempt to determine the etymological proportions of our 
entire verbal stock, because I believe no dictionary contains more than two- 
thirds, or at most three-fourths, of the words which make up the English lan- 
guage. Dictionaries are made from books, and for readers of books, and they 
all omit a vast array of words, chiefly Saxon, which belong to the arts and to the 
humbler fields of life, and which have not yet found their way into literary eir« 
cles. 



122 ETYMOLOGICAL PROPORTIONS OF ENGLISH. 

the same words, are counted. Thus, in the passage extending 
from the end of the period in verse 362 of the sixth book of 
Paradise Lost, to the end of the period in verse 372, there 
are seventy-two words. Eight of these are proper names and 
are rejected, but all the other words are counted, though sev- 
eral of them are repetitions of particles and pronouns. In 
the comparison of the total vocabularies, every part of 
speech is counted as a distinct word, but all the inflected forms 
of a given verb or adjective are treated as composing a sin- 
gle word. Thus, safe, safely, safety, and save, I make four 
words, but save, saved, and saving, one, as also safe, saf&i, 
safest, one. 

I have made no attempt to assign words not of Anglo- 
Saxon origin to their respective sources, but it may be as 
sumed in general that Greek words, excepting the modern 
scientific compounds, have come to us through the Latin, 
and both in this case and where they have been formed 
directly from Greek roots, their orthography is usually con- 
formed to the Latin standard for similar words. Words of orig- 
inal Latin etymology have been, as will be more fully shown in 
a future lecture, in the great majority of instances, borrowed 
by us from the French, and are still used in forms more in ac- 
cordance with the French than with the Latin orthography. 
The proportion, five per cent., allowed by Trench to Greek 
words, I think too great, as is also that for other miscellane- 
ous etymologies, unless we follow the Celtic school in refer- 
ring to a Celtic origin all roots common to that and the 
Gothic dialects. 

Taking the authors I have examined chronologically, I 
find, with respect to their total vocabularies, that in that of 
the Ormulum, which, in opposition to the opinion of most 
philologists, I consider English rather than semi-Saxon, 



ETYMOLOGICAL PROPORTIONS OF ENGLISH. 123 

though written probably not far from the year 1225, nearly 
ninety-seven per cent, of the words are Anglo-Saxon.* In the 
vocabulary of the English Bible, sixty per cent, are native ; 
in that of Shakespeare the proportion is very nearly the 

* Wicb the exception of a very few Latin terras, such as quadriga, 
vipera, &c, I have observed in the Ormulum no word of foreign etymology 
which had not been employed by Anglo-Saxon writers, and thus naturalized, 
while Anglo-Saxon was still a living speech. There is a considerable class of 
Saxon words, some of them very important with reference to the question of the 
moral culture of the people, the source and etymology of which it is difficult to 
determine. Law and right, for example, are by many etymologists derived re- 
spectively from the Latin lex and rectus. It is said that lagu and lah do 
not occur in Anglo-Saxon before the reign of Edgar, A. D. 959-975. But lagu 
bears the same relation to the Saxon verb lecgan, to lay, to set down, that the 
German Gesetz does to the verb setzen. The Mceso-Gothic 1 a g j a n is the 
equivalent of lecgan, and though no noun etymologically corresponding to 
law occurs in the slender remains we possess of that literature, yet a similar 
word is found in Old-Northeru as well as in Swedish and Danish. We have in 
the eighteenth stanza of the Volo-spa, one of the oldest poems of the Edda, 
brer lavg lavgdo, they enacted statutes, laid down the law. We cannot 
well doubt that lavg and lavgdo are related words, and it is not denied that 
the verb, as well as its cognates in the sister tongues, is of primitive Gothic 
origin. Jornandes, who wrote in the sixth century, has a word apparently from 
the same root, and even approximating to our by-law: Nam ethicam eas erudivit, 
ut barbarieos mores ab eis compesceret; physicam tradens naturaliter propiiis 
legibus vivere fecit, quas usque nunc conscriptas b e 1 1 a g i n e s (Hire, and some 
others, read, bilagines) nuncupant. — De Reb. Get. cap. xi. See App. 15. 

Right is found not only in Anglo-Saxon (riht), but in all the cognate lan- 
guages, and it is certainly improbable that the Moeso-Goths of the fourth century 
borrowed from the Latin rectus their raihts, right, just, and garaihts, 
righteous, which, with several derivatives from them, are used by Ulphilas. 

We are, therefore, entitled to consider law and right, and all their derivatives, 
as at least prima, facie English and not Latin words. At the same time, it must 
be remembered that history has taught us almost nothing of the moral and lin- 
guistic relations between the Romans and the progenitors of the modern Gothic 
and Celtic tribes, except that in culture and civilization, as well as in material 
power, the Latin was the superior race, and that Rome was in a position to 
exercise an immense moral as well as social influence over those rude popula- 
tions. With respect, therefore, to the vocabulary of law, of political life, and 
of intellectual action, we are treading on uncertain ground, when we positively 
affirm the domestic origin of a Gothic or Celtic root resembling a Latin one, and 
we can seldom be sure that such words have not passed directly from the latte» 
Ko the former, instead of descending from a common but remote source. 



124 VOCABULARIES OF AUTHORS. 

same ; while of the stock of words employed in the p Defcica. 
works of Milton, less than thirty- three per cent, are Anglo- 
Saxon. 

But when we examine the proportions in which authors 
actually employ the words at their command, we find that 
even in those whose total vocabulary embraces the greatest 
number of Latin and other foreign vocables, the Anglo-Saxon 
still largely predominates. Thus : 

Robert of Gloucester, narrative of Conquest, pp. 

354, 364, employs of Anglo-Saxon words, Ninety-six per cent. 

Piers Ploughman, Introduction, entire, Eighty-eight per cent. 

" Passus Decimus-Quartus, entire, Eighty-four per cent. 

" " Decimus-nonus and vicesimus, entire, Eighty-nine per cent. 

" Creed, entire. Ninety-four per cent. 

Chaucer, Prologue to Canterbury Tales, first 420 

verses,* Eighty-eight per cent. 

" Nonnes Preestes Tale, entire, Ninety-three per cent. 

" Squiers Tale, entire, Ninety-one per cent. 
" Prose Tale of Melibceus, in about 3,000 

words, Eighty -nine per cent. 

Sir Thomas More, coronation of Richard III. &c, f 

seven folio pages, Eighty-four per cent. 

* For the purpose of determining more satisfactorily the true character of 
the diction of Langland and of Chaucer, I have counted both the different words 
of foreign derivation, and the repetitions of them, in the Passus Decimus-Quartus 
of Piers Ploughman, and in an equal amount of the Prologue to the Canterbury 
Tales. Exclusive of quotations and proper names, the Passus Decimus-Quartus 
contains somewhat less than 3,200 words. Of these, including repetitions, 500, 
or sixteen per cent., are of Latin or French origin, and as there are about 180 
repetitions, the number of different foreign words is about 320, or ten per cent. 
In the first 420 verses of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the number of 
words is the same, or about 3,200, of which, including repetitions, about 370, 
or rather less than twelve per cent., are Romance. The repetitions are but 70,' 
and there remain 300, or rather more than nine per cent, of different foreign 
words. In either point of view, then, Chaucer's vocabulary is more purely 
Anglo-Saxon than that of Langland. It must be remembered, however, that 
there are few Romance words in Piers Ploughman which are not found in other 
English writers of as early a date, while Chaucer has many which occur for the 
first time in his verses, and were doubtless introduced by him. 

•f Ellis (Preface to reprint of Hardynge) doubto whether the life of Richard 



VOCABULARIES OF AUTHORS. 



125 



Spenser, Faerie Queene, Book II. Canto VII., 

New Testament : 

John's Gospel chap. I. IV. XVII., 
Matthew chap. VII. XVII. XVIII., 
Luke, chap. V. XII. XXII., 
Eomans, chap. II. VII. XI. XV., 

Shakespeare, Henry IV., Part I., Act II., 
u Othello, Act V., 

" Tempest, Act I., 

Milton, L'Allegro, 
" II Penseroso, 
" Paradise Lost, Book VI., 

Addison, several numbers of Spectator, 

Pope, First Epistle, and Essay on Man., 

Swift, Political Lying, 

" John Bull, several chapters, 
" Four last years of Queen Anne, to end of 
sketch of Lord Cowper, 

Johnson, preface to Dictionary, entire, 

Junius, Letters XII. & XXIII., 

Hume, History of England, general sketch of Com- 
monwealth, forming conclusion of chap. LX., 

Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. I. chap. VII., 

Webster, Second Speech on Foot's Resolution, 
entire,* 



Eighty-six per cent. 

Ninety-six per cent. 
Ninety-three per cent 
Ninety-two per cent. 
Ninety per cent. 
Ninety-one per cent. 
Eighty-nine per cent. 
Eighty-eight per cent. 
Ninety per cent. 
Eighty-three per cent. 
Eighty per cent. 
Eighty-two per cent. 
Eighty per cent. 
Sixty-eight per cent. 
Eighty -five per cent. 

Seventy-two per cent. 
Seventy- two per cent. 
Seventy-six per cent. 

Seventy-threcper cent. 
Seventy per cent. 

Seventy-five per cent. 



III., commonly ascribed to Sir T. More, was really written by him, but Ascham 
treats it as his, and in the edition of More's works prepared by his nephew, 
and printed in 1557, the preliminary note to the Life of Richard states expressly 
that it was composed by Sir Thomas about the year 1513, when he was sheriff 
of London, and that it is now printed from "a copie of his own hand.'" The 
internal evidence is, indeed, with Ellis; for, in point of style, this work is much 
superior to any of More's undisputed productions, and in fact, deserves the 
high praise which Hailam has bestowed upon it. Still, I think there is hardly 
sufficient ground for denying the authorship to More, and I have selected it 
as the best example of original English of that period. 

* The apparently large proportion of words of Latin origin in this great 
speech, popularly known as the Reply to Hayne, is chiefly due to the frequent 
recurrence of ' Congress,' ' constitution,' and other technical terms of American 
political law. Wherever it was not necessary to employ these expressions, the 
style is much more Saxon. Thus, in the" eulogy on Massachusetts containing 
more than two hundred words, eighty-four per cent, are native, and in the 
peroration, beginning ' God grant,' &c, the Anglo-Saxon words are in the pro 
portion of eighty per cent. 



126 INCKEASING IMPORTANCE OF SAXON ELEMENT. 

Irving, Stout Gentleman, Eighty-five per cent. 

" Westminster Abbey, Seventy-seven per cent 

Macaulay, Essay on Lord Bacon, Seventy-five per cent. 

Channing, Essay on Milton, Seventy-five per cent. 

Cobbett, on Indian Corn, chap XI., Eighty per cent. 

Prescott. Philip II. B. I. c. IX., Seventy-seven per cent. 

Bancroft, History, vol. VII. Battle of Bunker hill, Seventy-eight per cent. 

Bryant, Death of the Flower, Ninety -two per cent. 

" Thanatopsis, Eight}'-four per cent. 

Mrs. Browning, Cry of the Children, Ninety-two per cent. 

" Crowned and Buried, Eighty- three per cent. 

u Lost Bower, Seventy-seven per cent. 

Kobert Browning. Blougram's Apology, Eighty -four per cent. 
Everett, Eulogy on J. Q. Adams, last twenty 

pages, Seventy-six per cent. 
Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, Period II., 

chap. I., Seventy-three per cent. 

Tennyson, The Lotus Eaters, Eighty-seven per cent. 

<; In Memoriam, first twenty poems, Eighty -nine per cent. 

Buskin, Modern Painters, vol. II., Part III., Sec. 

II., Chap. V. Of the Superhuman Ideal, Seventy- three per cent. 

" Elements of Drawing, first six exercises, Eighty-four per cent. 

Longfellow, Miles Standish, entire, Eighty-seven per cent. 
Martineau, Endeavors after the Christian Life, III. 

Discourse. Seventy-four per cent. 

The most interesting result of these comparisons, perhaps 
the only one which they can be said to establish, is the fact, 
that the best writers of the present day habitually employ, in 
both poetry and prose, a larger proportion of Anglo-Saxon 
words than the best writers of the last century. This con- 
clusion is not deduced from the numerical computations just 
given alone, for in estimating the relative prominence of a 
particular element in the vocabulary, we must take into view 
the whole extent of that vocabulary. Now, in this lattei 
particular, there has been a great change since the time of 
Johnson, for while the number of Saxon words remains the 
same, there has been, within a hundred years, a large increase 



SUFFICIENCY OF ENGLISH. 127 

in terms of alien origin. Some older native words, it is true, 
have been revived, but these are not numerous. On the other 
hand, scarcely a word that Johnson and his contemporaries 
would have used has become obsolete, while the necessities 
of art, science, commerce, and industry, have introduced 
aiany thousands of Latin, French, and other foreign terms. 
Hence, with respect to vocabulary, the writers of this gen- 
eration are naturally, and almost necessarily, in the position 
in which Milton was exceptionally and artificially. The 
stock of words they possess contains more Latin than Saxon 
elements ; the dialect in which they accustom themselves to 
think and write is, in much the largest proportion, home-born 
English. This recognition of the superior force and fitness 
of a Saxon phraseology, for all purposes where it can be em- 
ployed at all, is the most encouraging of existing indications 
with respect to the tendencies of our mother-tongue, as a 
medium of literary effort. 

Had words of Latin and French etymology been propor- 
tionally as numerous in the time of Johnson and of Gibbon 
as they now are, those authors, instead of employing twenty- 
eight or thirty per cent, of such words, would scarcely have 
contented themselves with less than fifty. And had either 
of them attempted the sesthetical theories so eloquently dis- 
cussed by Ruskin, with the knowledge and the stock of 
words possessed by that masterly writer, their Saxon would 
have been confined to particles, pronouns, and auxiliaries, the 
mere wheel-work of syntactical movement. 

Johnson thought that " if the terms of natural knowledge 
were extracted from Bacon ; the phrases of policy, war, and 
navigation from Raleigh ; and the diction of common life from 
Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind, for want 



128 VOCABULARY OF MILTON. 

of English wcrds in which they might be expressed.'' At 
present, the works of Bacon hardly furnish terms for the pre- 
cise enunciation of any one truth of physical science ; nor 
would any English writer now think it possible to narrate the 
history of a political revolution, to discuss the principles of 
modern government, or of political economy, to detail the 
events of a campaign or a voyage, or to describe a battle, in 
the words of Ealeigh. Besides all this, the diffusion of 
knowledge, and of material appliances and comforts, has 
made the dialects of all the sciences more or less a part of the 
" diction of common life," and therefore we can no longer con- 
verse, even on fire-side topics, altogether in the language of 
Shakespeare. I do not think it at all extravagant to say that 
the number of authorized English words, the great mass of 
which is understood, if not actually used, by all intelligent 
persons, is larger, by at least one-fifth, than it was in the 
middle of the eighteenth century, and this great accretion of 
familiar vocables consists almost wholly of imported terms. 
Yet if we compare the usual proportion of Anglo-Saxon 
words employed by good writers of that epoch and of this 
with the whole vocabularies known to them respectively, we 
shall find the relative prominence of the Anglo-Saxon much 
greater in our own time ; for though we know numerically 
more foreign words, we actually use proportionally fewer in 
literary composition. 

The relation between Milton's entire verbal resources and 
his habitual economy in the use of them, is most remarkable. 
Some words of Greek and Latin origin, indeed, such as air, 
angel, force, glory, grace, just, mortal, move, nature, part, 
peace, &c, occur very often, but most of the foreign words 
employed by him are found in but a single passage, whereas 



INFLUENCE OF SUBJECT. 129 

the Saxon words are very ti any times repeated. Isor is the 
predominance of such to be ascribed to the number of parti- 
cles or other small words, for of these Milton is very sparing ; 
and if we translate almost any period in Paradise Lost into 
Latin, we shall find the difference between the number of de- 
terminative words in the original and the translation by no 
means large. All this is true, though in a less degree, of 
Shakespeare, and as illustrating the infrequency of Latin 
words, now common, in his works, I may observe that ab- 
nipt, ambiguous, artless, congratulate, im,probable, improper, 
improve, impure, inconvenient, incredible, are all aira^ 
Xeyofieva, once used words, with the great dramatist. 

In comparing the linguistic elements which enter into the 
dialect of literature as employed by different writers, I think 
the influence of subject and purpose upon the choice of words 
has not been sufficiently considered. AVe find that the vocab- 
ulary of the same writer varies very much in its etymologi- 
cal ingredients, according to the matter he handles and the 
aims he proposes to himself. This appears very manifestly 
from a comparison of the specimens selected for the foregoing 
computations from the New Testament and from Milton, and 
not less remarkably in those from Swift, Irving, and Euskin. 
The following passages from Irving, in which the words of 
foreign origin are printed in italics, may serve as illustrations. 
From the Stout Gentleman, in Bracebridge-IIall : 
" In one corner was a stagnant pool of water surrounding 
an island * of muck ; there were several half-drowned fowls 

* Island is one of those English words where a mistaken etymology has led 
to a corrupt orthography, hie may possibly be the French ile, anciently 
spelt isle, from the Latin insula, but the fact that Robert of Gloucester and 
other early English writers wrote ile or yle, at a time when the only French or- 
thography was isle, is a strong argument against tl is derivation. It is more prob 
9 



130 VOCABULARY OF IRVING. 

crowded together under a cart, among which was a misera- 
ble crest-fallen cock, drenched ont of all life and spirit y his 
drooping tail matted, as it were, into a single feather, along 
which the water trickled from his back ; near the cart was a 
half- dozing cow, chewing the end, and standing patiently to 
be rained on, with wreaths of vapour rising from her reeking 
hide ; a wall-eyed horse, tired of the loneliness of the stable, 
was poking his spectral head ont of a window, with the rain 
dripping on it from the eaves ; an nnhappy cur, chained to a 
dog-house hard by, uttered something every now and then be- 
tween a bark and a yelp ; a drab of a kitchen-wench tram- 
pled baclnvards and forwards through the yard in pattens, 
looking as sulky as the weather itself ; every thing, in short, 
was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of hard-drink- 
ing ducks, assembled like boon companions round a puddle, 
and making a riotous noise over their liquor." 

From Westminster Abbey, in The Sketch Book : 
" It was the tomb of a crusader y of one of those military 
enthusiasts, who so sfrangely mingled religion and romance, 
and whose exploits form the connecting link between fact and 
fiction, between the history and the fairy tale. There is 
something extremely picturesque in the tombs of these adven- 
turers, decorated as they are with rude armorial bearings and 
Gothic sculpture. They comport w T ith the antiquated chap- 
els in which they are generally found ; and in considering 
them, the imagination is apt to kindle with the legendary as- 
sociations, the romantic fiction, the chivalrous pomp and pa- 

ably a contraction of Hand, the Anglo-Saxon e aland, ealond, igland, and 
the « was inserted in both, because, when Saxon was forgotten, the words were 
thought to have come through the French from the Latin insula, in which the 
s is probably radical. Mr. Klipstein refers the s in island to the genitive in s of 
the Anglo-Saxon e& or ie. but this would be an unusual form of composition,, 
and I do not know that e /island occurs in Anglo-Saxon. 



LATIN WORDS IS ENGLISH. 131 

geantry which poetry has spread over the wars for the sepul- 
chre of Christ^ 

In the first of these extracts, out of one hundred and 
eighty-nine words, all but twenty-two are probably native, 
the proportions being respectively eighty-nine and eleven 
per cent. ; in the second, consisting of one hundred and six 
words, we find no less than forty aliens, which is proportion- 
ally more than three times as many as in the first. 

The most numerous additions to the Anglo-Saxon vocab- 
ulary, the most important modifications of English syntax, 
and consequently of the general idiom of our speech, have 
been mediately or immediately derived from the Latin. So 
far as grammatical structure is concerned, this influence com- 
menced in the pure Anglo-Saxon period, when of course 
proper English cannot be said to have existed. The Angles 
and the Saxons found upon the British soil some traces of 
the Roman conquest, and Christianity, and with it the lan- 
guage of the Romish church, were domesticated in England 
long before either had crossed the Elbe, and before a native 
literature had been created by the race which gave to Britain 
a Dew name and a new population. The Old-Northern or 
Scandinavian, and some branches of the Germanic families, 
on the contrary, had acquired a certain culture, and possessed 
what may fairly claim to be considered an independent lifc 
erature, before their adoption of Christianity. The Old-North- 
ern and Germanic languages had accordingly been carried 
to a higher degree of polish and refinement than the Anglo- 
Saxon, and they both less needed, and were less suscep- 
tible of receiving, grammatical improvement from foreign 
sources. We consequently find, even in the most ancient 
forms in which the Anglo-Saxon, itself but a compromise 



132 INFLUENCE OF LATIN AND NORMAN. 

between discordant dialects,* has come down to us, a struc- 
ture more resembling that of the Romance languages, than 
we meet in Old-Northern or in German. The arrangement 
of the period, the whole syntax, had been evidently already 
influenced, and the native inflections (if, indeed, they ever 
had been moulded into a harmonious system) diminished in 
number, variety, and distinctness. The tendencies which 
have resulted in the formation of modern English had been 
already impressed upon the Anglo-Saxon before the Norman 
Conquest ; and the more complete establishment of the ec- 
clesiastical domination of Rome had introduced some Latiu 
and French words, and expelled from use a corresponding 
portion of the native vocabulary. It even appears that the 
Romance dialect of Normandy had partially supplanted the 
Saxon as early as the reign of Edward the Confessor, and it 
is stated to have been a good deal used at that time at court, 
in judicial proceedings, and in the pulpit.f 

* See Lecture ii. 

f Able philologists have denied that the change which took place in the ver- 
nacular in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, was, in any consider- 
able degree, due to the influence of the Norman invaders, and it is argued that 
the same change would have taken place without the Conquest. It is, I believe, 
denied by none that the language and literature of England were very power- 
fully affected by that influence in the fourteenth century, and those who main 
tain the theory in question, ask us to believe, that though the relations between 
the immigrant and the indigenous population were still substantially the same, 
yet the causes which proved so energetic in the reign of Edward III. had been 
absolutely inert for two hundred and fifty years, and then suddenly and spon- 
taneously sprung into full action. I do not suppose it possible to distinguish 
between the effects produced by ecclesiastical Latin and by secular Norman, but 
to refuse to either of them a share in bringing about the change from the Anglo* 
Saxon of Alfred to the English of the reign of Henry III. is to ascribe to the 
Anglican tongue an unsusceptibility to external in^uences, which contrasts 
strangely with the history of its subsequent mutations. 

Price finds confirmation of this theory in alleged corresponding changes of 
the Low German dialects, and Latham in those of the Danish and Swedish. But 
the Low German, and the Danish and Swedish, have been exposed, not indeed 



PERFECTION OF ENGLISH. 133 

The causes which have led to the adoption of so arge a 
proportion of foreign words, and at the same time produced 
so important modifications in the signification of many terms 
originally English, are very various. The most obvious of 
these are the early Christianization of the English nation, a 
circumstance not always sufficiently considered in the study 
of our linguistic history ; the Norman conquest ; the Cru- 
sades ; and especially the mechanical industry and commer- 
cial enterprise of the British people, the former of which has 
compelled them to seek both the material for industrial elabora- 
tion, and a vent for their manufactures in the markets of 1he 
whole earth ; the latter has made them the common carriers 
and brokers of the world. With so many points of external 
contact, so many conduits for the reception of every species 
of foreign influence, it would imply a great power of repul- 
sion and resistance in the English tongue if it had not become 
eminently composite in its substance and in its organization. 
In fact, it has so completely adapted itself to the uses and 
wants of Christian society, as exemplified by the Anglo-Sax- 
on race in the highest forms to which associate life has any- 
where attained, that it well deserves to be considered the 

to precisely the same causes of revolution as the Anglo-Saxon, but to somewhat 
analogous influences, and in all these cases the nature and amount of change is, 
not corresponding to that of the Anglo-Saxon, but almost exactly proportioned 
to the character and amount of extraneous disturbing force. The Latin has 
operated more or less on all of them. The Icelandic, isolated as it is, has re- 
mained almost the same for seven centuries; the Swedish, and the dialects of 
secluded districts in Norway, being less exposed to foreign influences than the 
Danish, retain a very large proportion of the characteristics of the Old- 
Northern, while the language of Denmark, a country bordering upon Germanv, 
and bound to it by a thousand tics, has become almost half Teutonic. If then 
we are to refer such changes to inherent tendencies only, how are we to explain 
these diversities between dialects, which, even after the birth of what is dis- 
tinctively the English language, were still nearly identical? See Sir N. Bfadden'fl 
Tie face to La) imon, p. 1 , and the authorities there cited. See also Lecture XVII 



134 PERFECTION OF ENGLISH. 

model speech of modern humanity, nearly achieving La Ian 
gnage the realization of that great ideal which wise men ai\? 
everywhere seeking to make the fundamental law of politi- 
cal organization, the union of freedom, stability, and progress. 
It is a question of much interest how far the different 
constituents of English have influenced each other, or in 
other words, how far each class of them has impressed its 
own formal characteristics upon those derived from a differ 
ent source. Let us take the reciprocal influence of the Anglo- 
Saxon and the Latin. We shall find it a general rule, that 
where the English word is made up of a Latin root with new 
terminal syllables, or suffixes, which modify the signification 
of the word or determine the grammatical class to which it 
belongs, those syllables are Saxon, while instances of Saxon 
radicals with Latin terminations are comparatively rare. 
"With respect to prefixes, however, which, with the root, 
usually constitute compounds, not derivatives, the case is 
otherwise, and we have generally employed Latin prefixes 
with Latin roots,* seldom or never Latin prepositions with 
Saxon roots. We have indeed taken most of our Latin words 
entire in some derivative shape, as they were formed and 
employed by the Latins themselves, or the French after them, 
and thus the two great classes remain distinct in form, each 
following its own original law ; but neverthless if there is a 
change, the Latin yields. The Saxon roots with Latin pas- 

* The Saxon inseparable privative un-is an exception, a majority of our 
words beginning with this prefix being of Romance origin. At present, we 
incline to harmonize our etymology by substituting the Latin i n- for the native 
particle, in words of foreign extraction. For example incapable is now ex- 
clusively used for the older tmcapable. 

Palsgrave in his list of verbs, p. 650, gives us / outcept for / except but I 
have not met with this anomalous compound elsewhere, though outtake for 
except is very common in early English. 



ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH. 135 

ewe terminations are chiefly adjectives like eatable, hezrable^ 
readable, to a few of which custom has reconciled us ; but 
many words of this class employed by old writers, such as 
doable, are obsolete, and the ear revolts at once at a new ap- 
ulication of this ending ; whereas we accept, without scruple, 
Latin and French roots with a Saxon termination.* Motion- 
less, painful, painless, joyful, joyless, and even ceaseless, 
almost the only instance of the use of the privative ending 
with a verbal root,f offend no Englishman's sense of congru- 
ity ; nor do we hesitate to extend the process, and to say joy- 
less -ness, and the like. Foreign verbs we conjugate according 
to the Saxon weak form, but I remember scarcely an in- 
stance of the application of the strong conjugation, with the 

* There is a Saxon noun, of rare occurrence, aba 1, signifying ability, to 
which this termination might be referred. Did we not find in Icelandic a cor- 
responding root, abl or afl , which exists in too many forms to be otherwise 
than indigenous, I should suspect abal to be itself derived from the Latin ad- 
jective h a b i 1 i s. The historical evidence is in favor of deriving our adjectival end- 
ing in -lie from the Latin -abilis, - ib il is, through the French -able, -ible. 
hi early English, this termination had by no means a uniformly passive force, 
and it formerly ended many words where we have now replaced it by -al and -ful. 
Thus, in Holland's Pliny, mediciua&Ze is always used instead of medicinal; 
Fisher, in his Sermon had at the Moneth Minde of the noble Prynces Margaret.fi, 
countesse of Richmonde and Darbye, has vengeable for vengeful, and Hooker 
(Discourse of Justification) has pov/erable for power/W. Similar forms often occur 
in Shakespeare. We still say delectaWe for delight/w/, but this is going out of 
use. IinpeccaWe, however, maintains its ground among theologians, and com- 
fovtable is too strongly rooted to be disturbed. 

This ending not unfrequently made the adjective a sort of gerundial, 
and hence " it is considerate," in the literature of the seventeenth century, 
generally meant " it is to be considered." The adjective reliable, in the sense 
of worthy of confidence, is altogether unidiomatic. The termination in -ible is 
rather more uncertain in its force than that in -able. Milton's use of visible in 
Paradise Lost, I. 63, is remarkable. " Darkness visible" is not darkness as itself 
an object of vision, a mere curtain of black impenetrable cloud, but it is a sable 
gloom, through which, in spite of its profound otecurity, the fearful things it 
shrouded were supernaturally " visible." 

f Gower (Fauli's edition, II. 211, 214) uses havcless, but I do not know that 
this word is found elsewhere. Tireless and resistless occur in good writers. 



136 COMPARISON OF ADJECTIVES, 

letter-change, to a Romance root.* "We compare foreign ad 
jectives after the Saxon fashion, by the addition of the sylla- 
bles -er and. -est, except that recently, in conformity to a rule 
which has no foundation in good taste or in the practice of 
the best writers, we have, in polysyllables, almost exclusively 
employed the comparison by more and most. The rale I 
speak of probably originated in a sense of incongruity in the 
adaptation of the Saxon form of comparison to adjectives 
borrowed from the French, and ending, as modified by Eng- 
lish orthoepy, in -ous. The adjectives with this ending have 
all two, perhaps most of them three, syllables, and thus a re- 
pugnance, which at first belonged only to the termination, 
was gradually extended to native words resembling the French 
adjectives in the number of their syllables. Ascham writes 
znventivest, Bacon honordblest, and ancienter, Fuller emi- 
nentest, eloquenter, Hooker learnedest, solemnest, famousest, 
mrtuousest, with the comparative and superlative adverbs 
wiselier, easilier, hardliest, Sidney evenrepimngest, Coleridge 
safeliest, and similar forms occur abundantly in Shakespeare. 
In fact, the rule never was adopted by thoroughly English 
authors, and is happily little observed by the best usage of the 
present day. 

To one acquainted with the history of Great Britain, the 
comparative insignificance of the Celtic element, both as 
respects the grammar and the vocabulary of English, is a 
surprising fact, and the want of more distinct traces of Celtic 
influence in the development of the Continental languages is 
equally remarkable. 

* The participial adjective distraught from distract is a case of this sort, 
and Spenser (Faerie Queene, B. I. c. VI. St. 43) has raile for rolled, the preterite 
of roll, but there is some doubt whether roll is not of Anglo-Saxon, or at least 
f iothic parentage. 



INSIGNIFICANCE OF CELTIC. 137 

Of European languages, the Celtic alone has not propagated 
or extended itself, and it does not appear ever to have been 
employed by any but those rude races to whom it was abo- 
riginal, as well as vernacular. Nor has it in any important 
degree modified the structure, or scarcely even the vocabulary, 
of the languages most exposed to its action. Two thousand 
years ago, if we are to rely on the general, though it must be 
admitted, uncertain testimony of historical narrators and in- 
quirers, the British islands, France, a large part of Switzer- 
land, a considerable extent of the coasts of the Adriatic, of 
the valley of the Danube, and of Northern Italy, as well as 
portions of the Spanish peninsula, and an important terri- 
tory in Asia Minor, were, with the exception of small mari- 
time colonies of Italian, Greek, and Phenician origin, inhab- 
ited exclusively by Celts. The race is now confined to 
Western and South- Western England, the Scottish High- 
lands, Ireland, and a narrow district in Western France. In 
Wales alone did they attain an elevated original and spon- 
taneous culture, and in their disappearance from their wide 
domain, they have left indeed some ruined temples, some 
popular superstitions, as relics of their idolatrous worship, but 
scarcely a distinguishable trace of their influence in the char- 
acter, the languages, or the institutions of the peoples which 
have superseded them. Upon the Anglo-Caledonian border, 
the Saxons and the Celts were brought face to face, and, 
after centuries of alternate amity and hostility, reduced at 
length to a common rule, and to some extent amalgamated 
with each other. Yet the brief inroads and partial conquests 
of the Scandinavians have modified the Scottish dialect far 
more than the long neighborhood and close relations between 
the Saxons and the Celts. 



138 INSIGNIFICANCE OF CELTIC. 

•j We may safely say that though the primitive language 
of Britain has contributed to the English a few names of 
places, and of familiar material objects, yet it has, upon the 
whole, affected our vocabulary and our syntax far less than 
any other tongue with which the Anglo-Saxon race has ever 
been brought widely into contact. I might go too far in say- 
ing that we have borrowed numerically more words from the 
followers of Mohammed than from the aborigines of Britain, 
but it is very certain that the few we have derived from the 
distant Arabic are infinitely more closely connected with, and 
influential upon, all the higher interests of man, than the 
somewhat greater number which we have taken from the con- 
tiguous Celtic. 

These facts point to a very radical diversity, an irrecon- 
cilable incongruity, between the Celtic language and the dia- 
lects of the numerous unrelated races that have at one time 
and another reduced Celtic tribes to subjection. I am not 
ignorant that recent etymologists have found many resem- 
blances between Celtic and Gothic, as well as Romance rad- 
icals, but it is probable that in many instances these very 
words had been imposed upon the Celts by foreign influen- 
ces, and in others, the English words which have been said 
to be Celtic, such as crook, pan, and the like, can be traced 
as far back in Gothic as in Celtic dialects.* 



* I am not here controverting the opinions of Prichard and other advocates 
of the original Indo-European character of the Celtic languages, but I speak of 
the actual relations of the Celtic, the Gothic and the Romance tongues, through 
the period during which we can trace their fortunes with historical certainty. 
The Celtic dialects, at the earliest moment when we can be fairly said to know 
any thing of their vocabularies, had been long exposed to the action of Gothic 
and Romance influences, and the English language is a case in point to show 
that there is scarcely any limit to the proportion of foreign words which a 
tongue of inferior culture may incorporate into its stock, without losing its own 



INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE PREVAILS. 139 

Languages, like the serfs of ancient times and the middle 
ages, seem to be glebae adscriptitise, and it may be 
laid down as a general rule, that in cases of territorial con 
quest, unless the invaders have such a superiority of physical 
power as to be able to extirpate the native race altogether, or 
unless they possess a very marked superiority in point of in- 
tellect and culture, in short, wherever the subjected nation 
even approximates to an equality in material or mental force, 
the native dialect is adopted by the conquerors, and soon be- 
comes again the exclusive language of the country. Of this, 
history exhibits numerous instances, with few, if any, con 
flicting examples, and it is accordingly in the relative condi- 
tion and character of the parties, that we are to look for the 
causes of the predominance of the Gothic and Romance, and 
the disappearance of the Celtic people and languages. The 
extension of the Latin, wherever it took root, was the triumph 
of civilization, and of that knowledge which is power, over 
barbarism of manners and inferiority of intellect. In Greece, 
where the intellectual conditions were reversed, though the 
armies of Rome were victorious, her language never prevailed, 
while in the lower Danubian provinces, in Gaul, in Spain, 
and at last, after a long struggle, in Sicily, as well as a con- 
siderable part of Southern Italy, it superseded the indigenous 
dialects, wherever the Greek had not anticipated it. On the 
other hand, the barbarian invaders of the Roman empire 

radical character. "We have not only borrowed abstract and philosophical terms 
in multitudes, but many of our test words, our designations of the most familial 
ich as air, fact, feature, joint, color, sot/, are of Latin origin. It 
in far from improbable thai very many of (ho verbal. coincidences between tho 
Celtic and other EuropeaD languages may find their explanation in the action of 
like causes. Etymology has its fashion* and its caprices as well as other 
human pursuits, aud Kcltism seems just now to be the prevailing epidemic in 
this department. Sec A pp. 19 



140 MIXTURE OF LANGUAGES. 

adopted the languages of their new subjects, and Gkths, Van 
dais, Tatars alike, once established on what was now Chris- 
tian soil, were soon confonnded in speech with the conquered 
nation. Tims the Hnnno-Bulgarians exchanged their Tatar 
for a Slavic dialect. The Avars and Slaves domiciliated 
in Greece became Hellenized in language. The North- 
men in Western France adopted a Romance tongue, and the 
Teutons in France and Northern Italy, as well as the Goths 
in Spain, all conformed to the speech, no less than to the re- 
ligion of the native tribes. True, they in all cases more or 
less modified the newly acquired language, and dialectic dif- 
ferences between the different Romance branches, otherwise 
inexplicable, may in part be accounted for by corresponding 
differences between the tongues whose elements were thus 
mixed with them. Thus, modern Italian has a considerable 
infusion of Teutonic words and phrases, and there are com- 
munities south of the Alpine chain whose vocabulary is in 
the largest proportion Teutonic,* just as on the other hand we 



* The Cimbric districts, as they are called, consist of the Sette Comuni, and 
the Tredici Comuni. The Sette Comuni, or Seven Towns, occupy a territory 
thirty or forty miles square, bounded east and west by the Brenta and the 
Astico respectively, north by a chain of the Tyrolese Alps, and south by a 
low ridge which separates them from the plain of Vicenza. The Tredici Comuni, 
or Thirteen Towns, are of less than half as great territorial extent, and lie near 
Verona, chiefly in a north-eastern direction. There are also some small Cimbric 
communities in Friaul. The whole Cimbric population is thirty or forty thou- 
sand souls. Some thousands of these now use Italian exclusively, and that 
language is gradually superseding the Teutonic among the whole people. The 
Lord's prayer in Cimbric (Catechism of 1842) is as follows: 

" Unzar Vater von me Hiimmele, sai ga6art eiir halgar namo ; kemme dar 
eiir Hummel ; sai gataant allez baz ar belt jart, bia in Hummel, aso af d'earda ; 
ghetiiz heute iinzar proat von altaghe ; un lacetiiz naach iinzare schulle, bia bar 
lacense naach biar den da saint schullik iiz ; haltetuz gahutet von tentaciun; 
an hevetuz de libel. Aso saiz. 

See Schmeller's Cimbrisches Worterbuch, herausgegeben von Bergman^ 
1855. 



MIXTURE OF LANGUAGES. 141 

find in Switzerland, intermixed with a German population, 
small districts whose inhabitants, like those of Wallachia and 
Moldavia, still speak a corrupted modernized Latin. In some 
instances, the new element does not much affect the lexicalic 
character, but exhibits itself in the structure, the inflections 
and the syntax. Of this the Spanish is an instance. Northern 
words indeed are not numerous, but the syntax as well as the 
nobility of the land is largely informed with the sangre azul, 
the blue blood, of the Gothic invader. The entire peninsular 
speech, and especially the dialects of the provinces longest oc- 
cupied by the Moslems, were also much affected by the influ- 
ence of the Arabic* The Arabs did not adopt the language 
of Spain, for the reason that, though less numerous and 
physically weaker than the Spaniards, they were morally and 
intellectually the superior people, and they therefore imposed 
their language on their subjects, and essentially modified the 
speech of provinces never brought under their jurisdiction, 
though still within the reach of their influence. Spanish 
Jews and Spanish Christians wrote in Arabic. A Portuguese 
bishop composed in the language of the Koran treatises on 
the Deity, the immortality of the soul, purgatory, and eternal 
punishment, and Christian Spaniards not unfrequently em- 
ployed the Arabic character in writing their native tongue. 

In like manner, in the two centuries and a half of Arab 
dominion in Sicily, the culture of that remarkable people was 
so thoroughly rooted, that under the Northern conquerors 

* Interesting observations on the influence of the Gothic and Arabic upon 
the Romance of Spain will be found in Ticknor's Spanish Literature, vol. I. 95, 
and vol. III. 201, 337, 371, 385. The estimate of l Northern ' words in Spanish 
given from a native philologist at p. 385, ten per cent., seems to me too large, 
but the Gothic portion of the language is so much disguised in form as not 
readily to be recognized. 



142 ARABIC IN SPAIN AND SICILY. 

and the Hohenstaufen, Arabic was the language of com* 
merce, and even often employed in public monuments. The 
ordinances of the Norman princes of Sicily were as frequently 
drawn up in Arabic as in Greek or Latin, and in the Sicilian 
churches of the Norman period, Arabic inscriptions appear 
on the columns and other parts of the structures.* 

Considering the prominent political and commercial posi- 
tion of Spain in the sixteenth century, the importance of her 
literature, and the extent to which it was then cultivated in 
England, it is surprising that so few English words can be 
referred to a Spanish origin. Sidney, and other writers of 
that day, who imitated the poetic forms of Spain, borrowed 
nothing from her vocabulary, and even the dialect of naviga- 
tion and commerce has adopted few Spanish words which 
were not originally either Arabic or American. Cargo and 
embargo are certainly Spanish, trade and traffic probably so, 
but these stand almost alone in our vocabulary. We owe, in 
fact, more to Portuguese than to Spanish etymology, and it 
is remarkable, that many words now current almost all over 
Europe, and popularly supposed to be of African or East 
Indian derivation, are really native Portuguese. T\ms, fetish- 
ism or feticism, the low idolatry and sorcery of Western 
Africa, now so commonly used in all parts of Europe to sig- 
nify the most debased and superstitious material worship, 
and generally thought to be an African word, is only the 
Portuguese feitico, sorcery or witchcraft, which is proba- 
bly derived from the Latin fascinum, or, as some think, 
from veneficium; eoco, the well-known name of the nut 
of a palm, and of the tree that produces it, (usually spelled 

* Serradifalco, Duomo di Honreale, pp. 24, 41, 73, 84. See also YVitte, 
A.lpinischesu. Transalpiniscbes, 429. 



PORTUGUESE WORDS IN ENGLISH. 143 

erroneously cocoa, from a confusion with cacao, a totally dif- 
ferent vegetable,)* is the Portuguese word for bugbear, and, 
according to De Barros, the great historian of his country's 
oriental conquests, the name was applied to the nut from its 
rude resemblance to a distorted human face, or a mask used 
by nurses to frighten children ; f coir, the hemp-like fibre of 
the coco-nut husk employed for making cordage, is probably 
coiro or couro, the Portuguese form of the Latin co- 
r i u m , skin, rind or husk ; \ palaver, a council of African 
chiefs, is the Portuguese p alavra, word, talk ; commodore, 
derived by our dictionaries from the Spanish comendador, 
which is of altogether another signification, is a corruption 
of the Portuguese capitao mor, or chief-captain, a phrase 
precisely equivalent in meaning to our own term. Caste, as 
a designation of social or political rank or class, is from casta, 
a word of doubtful origin, common to Spanish and Portu- 
guese, but it was borrowed by both England and the North- 
ern Continental nations from the Portuguese accounts of In- 
dia. Cash and cashier are more probably from the Portu- 
guese caxa than from the French caisse, and even the 

* This false orthography is a comparatively recent corruption. The journals 
in Purchas, Dampier and all the old travellers, spell the word properly, coco, or 
sometimes cocos or coker. Johnson strangely blunders and confounds the signi- 
fication and etymology of coco and cacao, and modern botany has dignified (he 
Portuguese bugbear, by latinizing it into cocos, as the generic name of a 
branch of the palm family. 

•J- Esta casca * * * tern hnma maneira aguda, que quer semelhar o 
nariz posto entre dons olhos rcdondos; * * * por razao da qual figure 
gem ser figure, os nossos lhe ehamaram coco, nome imposto pelas mulheres a 
qualquer cousa, com que qucrem fazer medo as criancas, o qual nome assi lhe 
ficou, que ninguem lhe sabe outro, sendo o seu proprio, como lhe os Malabarea 
chamam, Tenga, e os Canary's, Narle. De Barros, Asia. Dec. III., Liv. III., 
cap. VII. 

\ I am aware that De Rarros and Castanheda write this word cairo, but 
the passages in which they troat it as oriental are equivocal. See App, 22. 



14:4 PORTUGUESE WORDS IN ENGLISH. 

current Chinese cash, the name of a small coin, has been sup 
posed to come from the Portuguese word. The same lan- 
guage suggests a possible etymology for the obscure word 
dungeon. The dungeon, dongeon, or donjon keep, (Low 
Latin , d u n j o , d o m g i o , d o m n i o ,) was originally the 
principal tower in a feudal castle. It is called in Portuguese 
torre de homenagen, tower of homage, because it con- 
tained the reception room, in which fealty or homage to the 
lord was pledged, and this is not improbably the source of 
the French word and our own. 

In all these cases, except the last, which is explained by 
the resemblance of the Portuguese homenagen to the feu- 
dal Latin h o m a g i u m , h o m a n a g i u m , h o m e n a g i u in , 
the early monopoly of distant navigation and of the African 
and East Indian trade by the Portuguese, accounts for the 
introduction of the words into the vocabulary, not of Eng- 
land only, but of all Europe ; and it is through the channel 
of commerce that we have borrowed the phrase to run-amuck 
from the Malays, taboo from the Sandwich Islands, and hun- 
dreds of other words now almost universal from equally re- 
mote and obscure sources. There is a very common word, 
demijohn, the name of a large glass bottle covered with wick- 
erwork, which occurs in most European languages, in nearly 
the same form. This strange word has been a sad puzzle to 
etymologists. It is often written in English with a hyphen 
between the second and third syllables, as if, notwithstanding 
its capacity, it were but the half of a whole John. In 
France, it is made a compound, dame-jeanne, Lady 
Jane, and a French etymologist has fabled that it took its 
name from its introduction into Europe by an apocryphal 
Lady Jane, a distinguished dame of that nation. Every one 



PORTUGUESE WORDS IN ENGLISH. 145 

who lia& been in the East will remember that this portly ves- 
sel is there called damagan, or d a m a j a n , and the name, 
as well as the thing, is generally supposed to have been bor- 
rowed from the Christians by the unbelievers. The fact is, 
however, that the demijohn was formerly largely manufac 
tured at Damaghan, a town in Khorassan, a province of Per- 
sia, once famous for its glass works, and hence the name. 
Our commercial nomenclature is full of similar instances, and 
the wide range of modern, and especially English, traffic, 
makes them simple enough ; but when we find that the Ice- 
landers, in their remote and isolated abode, call the elephant 
by the same name as the Arabs, feel, we are unable to ac 
count for so strange a coincidence, until we learn that in the 
good old times of simple mediaeval devotion, the neophyte 
Northmen were wont to signalize their conversion from the 
darkness of heathenism, by a Mediterranean venture, com- 
bining the characters of a piratical cruise and a pious pil- 
grimage. In these expeditions they now and then fell in 
with an argosy,* manned by paynim Arabs, or Blxiemcn, as 
they called them, or even entered the harbor of a Moorish 
town on the coast of Spain, or of Serkland , the land of 
the Saracens, plundered the infidels, if they were able, and 
trafficked with them if they were not. Hence it is that we 
find Cufic coin in Scandinavian barrows, Arabic words in the 
old Northern tongue. 

The study of foreign literatures, and the introduction of 
new words by foreign immigrants, in countries which, like 



* Argosy is generally supposed to be derived from the appellation of the 
mythic ship Argo ; but it has been suggested, and not without probability, that 
the name is a corruption of Ragusau, the national designation of the vessels 
employed in the commerce of the important port of Ragusa. 
10 



146 INTRODUCTION OF FOREIGN WORDS. 

England and America, are centres of attraction for the whole 
earth, are sources of accretion too familiar to require detailed 
consideration, but the effects of the extension of commerce 
and industry deserve more than a passing notice. Every 
new article of trade, every new style of foreign goods, brings 
with it either its native designation or an epithet indicative 
of the country whence it is imported, and the name very 
often remains in a new application after the particular arti- 
cle has disappeared from our market. Thus calico was orig- 
inally applied to certain cotton goods imported from Calicut, 
in India. "We now use it only of printed cottons of a very 
different texture, while in England all plain white cottons 
are called calico. In the Levant, the former superiority of 
American cotton goods gave them a preference in the markets, 
and the hawkers who sold cotton stuffs, of whatever fabric, 
in the streets, described them as American cotton to attract 
custom. Gradually they dropped the word cotton, and cloths 
of that material are now called simply Americans. When, 
therefore, an American traveller hears a Hebrew peddler cry- 
ing Americani! at his heels in the streets of Smyrna or 
Constantinople, he need not suppose that the Oriental is 
taunting him with his nationality ; it is only, in the want of 
a daily Times, or Tribune, or Herald, a mode of advertising 
that the colporteur has cottons to sell. 

Numerous as are the foreign words which commerce and 
foreign art have incorporated into English, it is probable that 
these loans have been repaid by England and America, in 
the contributions we have made to other languages. A dis- 
tinguished Southern gentleman comforted unlucky English 
bond-holders, in the days of repudiation, by assuring them 
that the Anglo-Saxon race, on our side of the Atlantic as well 
as on the other, was as much a debt-paying as a land-stealing 



DIFFUSION OF WORDS. 147 

people. I need not speak upon the question of pecuniary 
conscientiousness, but in words, which we can spare without 
much sacrifice, we have been just and even generous. Our 
trade and our industry, in conjunction with those of England, 
have sown a broad crop of English and American words over 
the face of the earth. A French poet complains that Eng- 
land has compelled his countrymen to utter articulations as 
hard as chewing glass or charcoal : 

Le railway, le tunnel, le ballast, le tender, 
Express, trucks, et wagons, une bouche Francaise 
Semble broyer du verre ou macher de la braise. 

These words have passed from England to every Conti 
nental country, but it is only a restitution of borrowed stock 
with usury, for of the seven, only ballast, wagons, and the 
last half of railway, are Anglo-Saxon. The nomenclature 
of steam navigation, which has become not less universal, is 
more purely American. "Wherever you meet the steamboat 
your ear will welcome familiar sounds. You will hear French 
men on the Rhone, Danes in the Belts, Teutons on the Rhine, 
Magyars and Slaves on the Danube, and Arabs on the Nile, 
all alike shouting, half-steam! stop her! go ahead! and many 
an uninstructed traveller has been agreeably surprised at 
finding such a remarkable resemblance between good mother- 
English and heathen Arabic or barbarous Dutch, as these 
homelike words so plainly indicate. 

Vegetable nature lias provided for the dissemination of 
plants by employing the movable winds and waters, and the 
migratory beasts of the field and fowls of the air, in the 
transportation of their seeds. Providence has not less amply 
pecured the diffusion and intermixture of words of cardinal 
importance to the great interests of man. Religion, natural 



148 DIFFUSION OF WORDS. 

science, moral and intellectual philosophy and diplomacy, 
have introduced into English thousands of words nearly iden- 
tical with those employed for the same pur] oses in all the 
languages in Christendom. The history and origin of these 
are generally very easily traced, but every generation gives 
birth to a multitude of expressions whose date we can fix 
with approximate precision, but the etymology and source 
of which is unknown at the very period of their introduction. 
These are, for the most part, mere popular words, which ob- 
tain no place in literature, but die with the memory of the 
occasions out of which they grew. But it sometimes hap- 
pens that such words become permanent, though often un- 
graceful, additions to our vocabulary, and remain as standing 
enigmas to the etymologist. Of such, our American caucus 
is an example, and every man's recollection will suggest other 
instances. 

The French essayist Montaigne gives us a striking exam- 
ple of the strange accidents by which foreign words are some- 
times introduced. In order the better to familiarize him with 
Latin, the common speech of the learned in those days, he was 
allowed in his childhood to use no other language, and not- 
only his teachers, but his parents, attendants, and even his 
chambermaid, were obliged to learn enough of Latin to con- 
verse with him in it. The people of the neighboring villages 
adopted some of the Latin words which they heard constantly 
used in the family of their feudal lord ; and, writing fifty 
years later, he declares that these words had become perma 
nently incorporated into the dialect of the province.* 

* Quant au reste de sa maison, c'estoit une regie inviolable que ny luy 
mesme, ny ma mere, ny valet, ny chambricre, ne parloient en ma compaignie 
qu' autant de mots de latin que chascun avoit apprins pour iargonner avec moy. 
C'est merveille du fruict que chascun y feit : mon pere et ma merey apprinderent 



DIFFUSION OF WORDS. 149 

assez dc latin pour l'entendre, et en acquirent a. suffisance pour s'en servir a la 
necessite, corarae feirent aussi les aultres domestiques, qui estoient plus attachez 
a mon service. Somme, nous latinizasmes tant, qu'il en regorgea iusques a 
nos villages tout autour, ou il y a encores, et ont prins pied par l'usage, plusicura 
appellations latines d'artisans et d'utils. Montaigne, Essais, Liv. I. ch. XXV. 

Iu order th^t I may not be supposed to have borrowed from a contemporary 
who has introduced into a recent volume some of the Portuguese etymologies 
mentioned above, together with the example from Montaigne, I think it proper 
to say that all those etymologies, with two or three exceptions not material to 
the present purpose, and the illustration from the French essayist, were given 
by me in this lecture, at its delivery in November, 1858, and contained in an 
extract printed in the New York Century, in March, 1859, for the most part in 
the very words since employed by the ingenious «\nd agreeable writer to whom 
I refer. Although credit was not given, I certainly do not imagine that there 
was any intentional appropriation of matter collected by me, and I state the 
fact only to defend myself against a possible charge, of which 1 very cheerfully 
acquit the author in question. 



LECTUKE VII. 

SOURCES AND COMPOSITION OF ENGLISH. 

II. 

The English language, though by no means wanting in 
philological individuality and grammatical unity, is, as we 
have seen, very heterogeneous in its vocabulary. Its harmony 
and coherence of structure are due to the organic vitality 
of its cardinal and fundamental element, the Anglo-Saxon 
tongue, which possesses not only an uncommon receptivity 
with reference to the admission of foreign ingredients, but an 
equally remarkable power of assimilating strange constitu- 
ents, naturalizing them as we say in America, and converting 
them from alien, if not hostile, forces, into obedient and use- 
ful denizens. There is found elsewhere, and especially in th 
languages of those Oriental families upon whom the Arabs 
have imposed their religion, and with it their theological dia- 
lect and their law, a great readiness to admit foreign words and 
foreign phrases, without moulding these linguistic acquisitions 
into any idiomatic conformity with the principles of their 
own structure. Arabic words are received into Persian and 
Turkish with all their anomalous inflections, and whole 
phrases borrowed, without any change of form or terrain a- 



FOREIGN PHRASES. 151 

tion to suit them to the genius and the syntax of the speech 
that adopts them. Persons familiar with the literature of 
Germany and of Scandinavia will rememher that in the sev- 
enteenth century the languages of those countries exhibited, 
in a marked degree, a similar tendency with respect to Latin 
technical phrases and combinations, and many of our old 
English writers indulge largely in the same practice. The 
purism, which has for some time prevailed in Germany and 
Scandinavia, has expelled from their respective literatures not 
only foreign complex phrases, but, to a considerable extent, 
all words of extraneous etymology. In English, we have no 
means of supplying the place of such expressions, and the 
essentially mixed character of the speech renders them less 
repugnant to our taste than they are in languages which are 
so constituted as to be able to do without them. A large 
proportion of these foreign mercenaries were first employed 
in the nomenclatures of the learned professions, and many 
are still confined to them. Others have passed from the bar, 
the pulpit, and the academic hall into the language of com- 
mon life, and are, though with a certain hesitation, often used 
by the most unschooled persons. The lawyer speaks of the 
rule caveat emptor, denies the authority of an obiter 
dictum, contends that the onus probandi lies on the 
other side, disputes how far words spoken are a part of the 
res gestae, and mentions an undecided question as being 
still sub j u d i c e. These, with many more of the like sort, 
remain the exclusive property of that much suffering profes- 
sion, which is condemned 

to drudge for the dregs of men, 
And scrawl strange word's with a barbarous pen, 

while others have become parcel of the heritage of the lay 



152 FOREIGN PHRASES IN ENGLISH. 

gents, as lawyers call the non-professional world. The dia- 
lects of logic, of criticism, and of parliamentary law, have 
also contributed largely to scatter through our speech these 
incongruous expressions, the currency of which amounts to a 
confession, that our own language is too poor to furnish a 
dress for many ideas which we have borrowed from alien 
sources. People who know small Latin make deductions a 
priori, a posteriori, and a fortiori, use arguments 
ad hominem, and denounce the conclusions of their op- 
ponents as non sequiturs; college graduates make affec- 
tionate mention of their alma mater; critics quote ver- 
batim et literatim, and note a casual error of speech as 
a lapsus 1 i n g u se ; in all deliberative bodies resolutions are 
adopted, nemine contradicente, and when the busi- 
ness of the meeting is terminated, the assembly is adjourned 
sine die; protectionists and free-traders dispute about ad 
valorem duties; politicians hold ofiices ad interim, 
durante benepiacito, or pro tempore; all the world 
says et cetera; and vice versa, though with a pronun- 
ciation of the v which comes unfortunately near a w, has 
even entered into the vulgar Cockney dialect. Many Greek 
and Latin nouns are employed in English with their original 
plurals. Thus we write -phenomena not phenomenon*/ 
memoranda perhaps more frequently than memorandum*/ 
termini of a railroad not termimcsses, and some very classical 
and critical persons have gone so far as to say omnibi for om- 
nibus^*. But all these are exceptional cases, and the fre 
quent use of foreign forms and phrases is contrary to the 
genius of every cultivated language, as well as to the general 
rules of idiomatic propriety and good taste.* 

* Ignis fatuus, now very common, does not appear to have been current 
ji Fuller's time, for in his comment on Ruth, p. 38, he uses meteor of foolish fire. 



CHARACTERISTIC FORMS. 153 

In inflected languages, declinable words, including all 
those which embody the fundamental meaning of the period, 
usually have endings which not only determine their gram- 
matical class and category, but are also characteristic of the 
language to which they belong. Thus, for instance, in a 
Greek or Latin article, noun or adjective, the terminal sylla- 
bles alone generally tell us the number, case and gender of 
the word ; in a verb, the number, mood, tense and voice ; 
and in all these parts of speech, they further inform us that 
the radical which they qualify is Greek and not Latin, or the 
contrary. In English, on the other hand, we have very few 
endings which are indicative of the class of the word, of its 
grammatical relations, or of the etymological source from 
which it is derived. For this reason, and because also our 
few specific terminations are in many cases applied to foreign 
roots, we can never confidently pronounce upon the nation- 
ality of English vocables, by the terminal syllables alone. A 
similar uncertainty, though in a somewhat smaller degree, 
prevails with respect to prefixes and other initial syllables, 
and therefore, especially since the assimilation of the Eng- 
lish orthography to that of the Continental languages, it is 
impossible to lay down precise rules for determining, by the 
form of a word, whether it is of domestic or of alien origin. 
But it is, for a variety of reasons, desirable to be able to refer 
the several constituents of our language to their proper 



instead, and Marvell applies the same phrase to the glow-worm. We can hardly 
1 to have had a puristic period or school in English, but individual 
writers have occasionally manifested such a tendency. Mulcaster, for example, 
is sparing of words of Greek origin, and prefers the more familiar Latin, 
sometimes substituting for the Greek new-coined terms from Latin roots, in the 
want of flexible Saxon primitives. But these he conforms to the English rules 
of derivation, or, as he calls it, enfranchises them. Thus he uses severer for 
diaeresis, and uuitcr for hyphen. See Lecture XXVII. 



154: PARTS OF SPEECH. 

sources, and, in spite of the uncertainty c f any one criterion, 
we may, by the use of several, including not the form only, 
but the grammatical class of the word, and its general sig- 
nification, form a probable judgment as to its nationality, 
even without a technical knowledge of etymology. 

The first and most obvious criterion with respect to the 
origin of English words, is found in the grammatical class 
to which they belong. Interjections are so much alike 
throughout the world, that none of the few we possess can 
be said to be exclusively characteristic of English, but most 
of our true interjections are doubtless of native growth. The 
articles, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliary verbs ; 
the numerals * one, two, three, four, and so on up to million, 
exclusive ; the ordinals to the millionth exclusive ; all these 
are Anglo-Saxon, except the ordinal second, which we have 
borrowed from the Latin through the French. The simple 
life of the Anglo-Saxons gave them little occasion for num- 
bers beyond thousands, and modern astronomy, by making 
us familiar with celestial distances, first taught us the want 
of greater numerical expressions. The singular exception of 
second among the ordinals is due to the fact, that neither in 
Anglo-Saxon nor the cognate Icelandic, was there any 
specific ordinal corresponding to the numeral two, the place 
of such an one being supplied in both by other, and they 
counted first, other, third, &c.f 

* Rask ranks the numerals with the pronouns, and some other gramma- 
rians incline to make them a class by themselves. 

•{■ The want of etymological relationship between the numerals and the 
ordinals is by no means exclusively characteristic of the Gothic languages. Aa 
the English first is not derived from one, and second is foreign altogether, so the 
Latin primus and secundus are in no way connected with unus and duo, 
nor is the Greek irpSiTos a derivative of %is. First, primus, and irpwros are re- 
spectively formed from prepositions or adverbs meaning before, so that first is 
foremost, and we find foremest for first in Mandcville and other old writers. 



NAMES OF RELATIONSHIP. 155 

Having thus assigned exclusively to the Anglo- Saxon one- 
half the parts of speech, we have only the substantives, ad- 
jectives, verbs and adverbs to deal with. 

With respect to the signification of words, as a clew to the 
linguistic source from which they are derived, it may be ob- 
served that, in general, the familiar names of the mem- 
bers and organs of the body and their functions, the words 
indicative of the common duties, cares, labors, and passions 
of rural and domestic life, in short, of all those primary ob- 
jects, arts and sentiments, with which we become acquainted, 
not through books, but by the daily round of human expe- 
rience, are Saxon. In examining the vocabulary more in 
detail hereafter, I shall have occasion to refer again to this 
point, and I will only mention here one remarkable peculiar- 
ity with respect to English words denoting the degrees of 
family relationship. The Anglo-Saxon had its appropriate 
names for the direct as well as collateral relatives, in both 
the ascending and the descending line, though, as in all dia- 
lects belonging to rude and patriarchal life, where the family 
is kept together for generations, the designations of all but the 
nearest relations of affinity and consanguinity were vaguely 
employed.* Now, in the transition from the simple manners 
of the Anglo-Saxons to the more civilized and artificial insti- 
tutions and language of their English successors and repre- 

The Anglo-Saxon forms of this word obviously point to this etymology. 
Furthest is found for first in Lord Herbert's Life, and Gower, II. 2, has the same 
form. The Latin seeundusis clearly allied to the root of s e q u o r , I follow 
and 8ocundus is following. See Appendix, 25. 

* Thus in the Armenian provinces of Russia, where the patriarchal system 
Btill subsists in full vigor, and all the descendants remain in the family of the 
ancestor as long as he lives, the younger members, of the same degree, are 
known to each other as brothers and sisters, and cousins are not regarded as 
remoter relatives than children of the same parents. — See Haxthausen, Trans 
caucae ; a. 



156 CHARACTERISTIC LETTERS. 

sentatives, we have retained the primitive names for those 
relatives who, in advanced stages of society, usually compose 
one household and gather around one fireside ; but we have 
rejected the native appellations for all those who presumably 
dwell under another roof-tree, and, regarding them as, com 
paratively, strangers, have bestowed upon them foreign 
names. Father, mother, husband, wife, bridegroom, bride, 
son, daughter, brother, sister, step-father and mother, step- 
son and daughter, are all pure Anglo-Saxon, while grand- 
father and grand-mother, grand-son and grand- daughter, 
nephew and niece, are half Romance, uncle, aunt and 
cousin, altogether so. 

The next comprehensive rule is that monosyllables, of 
whatever class, and words compounded or derived from mon- 
osyllables which exist independently in English, are Anglo- 
Saxon. To this general statement there are many exceptions, 
but these will in most cases be recognized by the aid of rules, 
derived from the character of the initial and permanent final 
letters. 

As respects initial radical letters, not prefixes, it will be 
found that the following generally indicate an Anglo-Saxon 
origin ; bl and br* dr,\ gl and gr, k, and especially Jen, 
and sh. Words beginning with ea are almost uniformly An- 
glo-Saxon. I remember no exceptions but eager, eagle, and 
their derivatives, and in fact, the same combination or that 
of oa, as in oak, occurring in any part of a word, usually in- 



* The principal exceptions to this rule are blame, blanch, blank, blaspheme, 
blemish, blench ; brace, several scientific compounds and derivatives from the 
Greek $pax^u, branch, brief and other derivatives from the Latin brevia, 
brick, brilliant, and few other doubtful or less important words. 

j Except drape, dress, and some others. 



CHARACTERISTIC LETTERS. 157 

dicates a Saxon root, as does also the semi- vowel w. Th is 
found only in words originally Saxon or Greek. 

On the other hand, the great frequency of Latin words 
compounded with prepositions makes it probable: That if the 
first letter be the vowel a, the word is Latin with the prefix 
a b , ad or ante; if e followed by a consonant, Latin with 
the preposition e or ex ; if co, Latin with the prefix con or 
cum ; if de, Latin with the prefix de ; if i, Latin with in ; 
if o, followed by a consonant, Latin with the prefix ob ; if 
p, Latin with the prefix per, prse, prseter, or pro; if 
su, Latin with the prefix sub or super; if r, Latin with 
the prefix r e . 

The diphthong cb, though employed in Anglo-Saxon, is 
no longer found in native English words, and its occurrence 
in any syllable now marks a Latin or Greek origin ; ecm, oi 
and ou are almost confined to words of modern French forma- 
tion, though roid and -oidal terminate many words derived 
from the Greek, and they are also used as endings expressive 
of likeness in connection with roots belonging to other lan- 
guages. 

A Greek etymology is indicated by the initials eu and 
sometimes en ; as also by w, the prefixes apo, para, and peri, 
and sometimes jyro ; and by the initial combinations chr and 
rh ; by ph and th occurring anywhere in a word, and in 
verbs, by the ending -ize, though this is sometimes used with 
Romance roots, as in fraternize. 

The Anglo-Saxon had several distinct terminations for 
adjectives, and faint traces of most of them may still be de- 
tected ; but those most readily recognizable are -y, as in 
windy, cloudy ; -ish and -some, as in whitish, gamesome ; -fid, 
as fearful ; and -less, as in lovdess. Of these, all but the last 
two are chiefly confined to Saxon roots, while -ful and -less 



158 CHARACTERISTIC LETTERS. 

are applied indiscriminately to radicals from all sources, as 
painful, joyless.* 

One of the most familiar English endings of nouns is -cr, 
indicative of the agent, but it is now so completely confounded 
with the Latin -or, and the French -eur, represented in 
our orthography by or and our, that it has lost its value as a 
characteristic. The nominal endings -dom and -hood, and the 
diminutive -ling, pretty certainly indicate that the word is 
pure English, while -ness and -ship, both Anglo-Saxon end- 
ings, are freely applied to French and Latin primitives. 

The Saxon infinitive verbs ended in -an, but since we 
have dropped this characteristic, we have no verbal endings, 
exjept those in -ize, and -ate, used with foreign roots only, and 
the terminations of the tenses and participles, which are ap- 
plied indiscriminately to all verbs, without regard to etymol- 
ogy. If, however, a verb is declined with what is called the 
strong conjugation, or by a change of vowel, as present 
oredk, past hroke, it is almost certainly Anglo-Saxon. 

The French or Latin endings -ous for adjectives, -ess as 
the sign of the feminine noun, -ment expressive of state or 
condition, -anee, -ty, -on, and -ude, are in most cases employed 
only with Romance roots ; and though convenience and habit 
have reconciled us to endearment, a Saxon radical with a 
Romance prefix and termination, we reluctantly accept new 
heterogeneous combinations of this sort. Enlightenment, a 
word of like formation, though very much wanted, has long 
knocked at our door, without being yet fairly admitted to 
the native circle. 



* The adverbial ending -ly is applied indiscriminately to Saxon and foreign 
roots, though its use has been much restricted in more modern English. In the 
prologue to an old translation of the Scriptures, (Wycliffite versions, i. p. 37 n.,) 
we find ffirueli, Grcekly, Latynly, corresponding to the Latin Hebraicd, 
Srsece, Latine, and in Wyoliffe, Mark xii. 1, parably for, in parables. 



CHAEACTEEI6TIC FORMS. 159 

Most of these rules have their exceptions, and they do not 
exhaust the list of etymological characteristics, tut I believe 
they embrace the principles of most frequent and general 
application, and they will be found sufficient to determine the 
origin of a great majority of the words of our vocabulary. 

With the exception of Greek, as the source of most 
of the newly framed nomenclature of science, the Latin and 
the French are the only languages which have contributed 
any large masses of words to our general stock, though par- 
ticular imported arts and processes have brought with them 
technical terms belonging to other tongues. 

It is often impossible to determine from internal evidence, 
from the form, alone, of a word of original Latin etymology, 
whether we derived it directly from its primitive source, or 
have taken it at second-hand from the French. But I think 
that in most of these doubtful cases, the balance of probabil- 
ity is strongly in favor of the French, as the immediate par- 
ent ; and this I argue from the fact, that though the influence 
of the Latin had modified the Saxon syntax, it had not, to 
the same extent, affected the general vocabulary of the 
people, until the Norman Conquest made French the official 
language of the government and the fashionable dialect of 
the nobility. Most old words of this class make their first 
appearance in translations from the French, as for instance 
in Chaucer's versions. Nor is the strict conformity of a 
word to the Latin orthography by any means a proof that 
it was first borrowed from the Latin ; for when classical lit- 
erature became a familiar study in England, as it did soon 
after the invention of printing, very many words which had 
been introduced from France, arid long used with the French 
orthography, were reformed in their spelling, so as to bring 
them nearej to their primitive etymology, and then a ne/w 



160 LATIN WORDS IN ENGLISH. 

pronunciation was often adopted, more accordant to the new 
orthography. These changes both in form and orthoepy are 
of much philological interest, but as I shall have occasion to 
examine them more fully hereafter, I will here content my- 
self with a single instance. Subject was originally written 
subgette or sugette without the c, and of course pronounced 
without it, as in French. "When it was recognized as a 
Latin word, the c was restored, and the pronunciation 
changed accordingly. 

The Anglo-Saxon embodies the formative principle, and 
is, in the strongest possible sense, the organic mother of the 
English language. I repeat, in the strongest sense, because 
although we have admitted a great number of foreign words, 
so great, in fact, that we may be said to have two parallel 
vocabularies, and to have created a language within a lan- 
guage, yet, after all, in the essential characters of speech, 
there is a closer resemblance between our modern dialect and 
Saxon, than between Italian and Latin, although there are 
few Italian words not derived from the Latin. Indeed, this 
double form of our language, with respect to what are called 
lexicalia, or mere etymology, is a fact altogether unique in 
European philology. We possess a garment which, remain- 
ing always the same in form, may yet be worn either side 
out, throwing up now the warp and now the woof, and pre- 
senting almost a complete diversity of colors as well as of 
tissue, and we have the rare facility of so modifying our 
complexion, as to be entitled to lay claim to exclusive cousin- 
ship with either the Gothic or the Romance families, and yet 
sail the whole time under the Saxon nag. It is true that while 
we can readily frame a sentence wholly in Anglo-Saxon, we 
cannot easily do the same with words entirely Latin, because 
the determinative particles and auxiliaries, the bolts, pins and 



ANGLO-SAXON ELEMENT, 101 

innges of the structure, must be Saxon. In borrowing Latin 
words, we brought with them neither their inflections nor 
their particles, and, therefore, though we may make them the 
ashlar of the period, yet both the mortar and the bond are 
always English. 

The following extract from Macaulay's article in the Ed- 
inburgh Review, on Croker's Boswell, well illustrates the dif- 
ference between a Saxon English and a Latinized diction : 

" Johnson's conversation appears to have been quite equal to his writ- 
ings in matter, and far superior to them in manner. When he talked, he 
clothed his wit and his sense in forcible and natural expressions. As 
soon as he took his pen in his hand to write for the public, his style 
became systematically vicious. All his books are written in a learned 
language — in a language which nobody hears from his mother or his 
nurse — in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, 
or makes love — in a language in which nobody ever thinks. It is clear 
that Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in which he wrote. The 
expressions which came first to his tongue were simp'e, energetic, and 
picturesque. "When he wrote for publication, he did his sentences out of 
English into Johnsonese. His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale 
are the original of that work, of which the Journey to the Hebrides is the 
translation, and it is amusing to compare the two versions. ' W T hen we 
were taken up stairs,' says he in one of his letters, ' a dirt)* fellow bounced 
s>ut of the bed on which one of us was to lie.' This incident is recorded in 
the Journey as follows : * Out of one of the beds on which we were to 
repose, started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the 
forge.' Sometimes Johnson translated aloud. ' The Rehearsal,' he said, very 
unjust!)', *has not wit enough to keep it sweet;' then, after a pause, 'It has 
not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction." 

In the first of the two periods just quoted, the style is 
characterized as unidiomatic, quite as much by the suspen- 
sion of the sense, in consequence of the complicated inver- 
sion, " Out of one of the beds, started up, at our entrance, a 
man," as by the selection of the words which compose it. 

Many languages are so copious and so flexible, that the 
3ame thing, or nearly the same thing, may be said in several 
11 " 



162 ANG*0-SAXON ELEMENT. 

different forms, but there are few, if any, wl ere the lange of 
expression is so great as in English. Take, for example, two 
or three good English translations of a foreign author, and 
you will generally find them, though perhaps equally true to 
the original, yet very widely different from each other, both 
in vocabulary and in structure of period. This may happen 
in different ways. One translator may choose his words 
from the Saxon, the other from the Latin stock, or they may 
incorporate into their respective styles the two elements in 
equal proportions, but differ in their selection of synony- 
mous expressions ; or again, they may prefer, the one a struc* 
ture of period formed more upon classical, the other more 
upon indigenous models. 

In spite of the necessity of frequently introducing de- 
terminatives in languages with few inflections, it will in gen- 
eral be found that a given period, framed wholly in Anglo- 
Saxon, will contain as few words, perhaps even fewer, than 
the same thought expressed in the Komance dialect of Eng- 
lish. The reason of this is that the unpleasant effect of the 
frequent recurrence of particles has obliged us to invent forms 
of expression in which such members, though grammatically 
required to complete the period, are dispensed with, and we 
use those forms with less repugnance in Saxon combinations 
where they were first employed, than in Latin ones, which 
are of later introduction and less familiar structure. Thus 
we say, ' The man I bought the house of,' ' the man we were 
talking of,' and we may, with equal grammatical propriety, 
say, l the gentleman I purchased. the house of,' ' the person 
we were conversing of; ' but we should be much more likely 
to employ a more formal syntax, ' the gentleman of whom 
l purchased the house,' < the person of whom we were con- 



ANGLO-SAXON ELEMENT. 163 

versing.' Again, one would say, < I told him I had called on 
General Taylor,' omitting the conjunction that, before the 
second member of the period ; but if we employed Romance 
words, we should more probably retain the conjunction, as, 
i 1 informed him that I had paid my respects to the Presi- 
dent.' Although, then, the Anglo-Saxon so far controls all 
other elements, that we may grammatically employ foreign 
words in the same way as native ones, yet a half-unconscious 
6ense of linguistic congruity usually suggests a more formal 
structure of the period, when it is composed chiefly of Ro- 
mance radicals. 

Our best proverbs and proverbial phrases, especially the 
alliterative and rhyming ones, our pithy saws, our most strik- 
ing similes and descriptive expressions, and our favorite quo- 
tations, are in general, wholly, or in a very large proportion, 
made up of native English words. Take for example these 
quotations from Scripture : 

" Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." 

" His hand shall be against every man, and every man's hand against 

him." 

" Bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave." 
" I have been young, and now am old ; yet have I not seen the right- 
eous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." 

" If I forget thee, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning." 

" "Whatsoever thy hand iindeth to do, do it with thy might." 

" Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many 

days." 

" For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." 
;t And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears 

into pruning-hooks." 

" Therefore, whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye 

even so to them ;" and so, the popular version of this law : — " Do as you 

would be done by." 

" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all 

thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind. Thou shalt 
ovc thy neighbor as thyself." 



164 ANGLO-SAXON ELEMENT. 

In these quotations, as well as in 1 /undreds of others from 
the same exalted source, every word, with the doubtful ex- 
ception of pruning, is Saxon. So, these proverbs are ex- 
pressed wholly in native English : 

When you are an anvil, hold you still ; 

When you are a hammer, strike your fill. 

If you do not want to go into the oven, lie athwart the door. 

Be not a baker, if your head be of butter. 

The horse thinks one thing ; he that rides him another. 

The singing-man keeps his shop in his throat. 

One nail drives out another. 

Where an important thought, a maxim or illustration, has 
been uttered by equally high authorities in the Saxon and the 
Latin idiom, the former acquires established popular curren- 
cy. The parable of the man who built his house upon the 
sand is given us by both Matthew and Luke, and the two 
narratives are identical in their facts. Matthew, as rendered 
by the authorized translation, gives the catastrophe in plain 
Saxon-English : 

" And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, 
and beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it." — Matt, 
vii. 27. 

The learned evangelist Luke employed a more classic style 
of narrative, and the translators have endeavored to give the 
effect of this by a less idiomatic and more ornate Latinized 
diction : 

" Against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it 
fell, and the ruin of that house was great." — Luke vi. 49. 

The narrative of Matthew specifies two circumstances 
omitted by Luke, " the rain descended," and " the winds 
blew." In the former phrase our translators employed the 
Latin word " descended" in order to avoid the repetition of 



ANGLO-SAXON ELEMENT. 105 

the verb "fell" which was needed in the subsequent clause 
describing the fall of the house, but otherwise the words are 
all Saxon. 

In the corresponding passage in Luke, there are three em- 
phatic Latin words, vehemently, immediately and ruin. Now 
let us compare the two passages, and say which, to every Eng- 
lish ear, is the most impressive : 

" And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and 
beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it." 

"Against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it 
fell, and the ruin of that house was great." 

There can scarcely be a difference of opinion as to the rel- 
ative force and beauty of the two versions, and accordingly 
we find that while that of Matthew has become proverbial, 
the narrative of Luke is seldom or never quoted.* 

* It may be interesting to compare the Greek text of these two passages 
with the Mceso-Gothic, and the early Anglican versions. I give the Greek 
(Seholz's text) and Tyndale's translation from Bagster's Hexapla, London, 1841 ; 
the Mceso-Gothic from Gabelentz and Loebe, the Anglo-Saxon from Klipstein, 
and Wycliife from the Wyeliffite versions, Oxford, 1850. 
From Matthew vii. 27. 

Kcd KaTefSir) 7) fipoxh koX ■fihSov ol irora/uLol, ical eirvevarav oi &v6[jloi, koX TrpoaeKO^/av 
Tfi oIk'lo. iiceipTj, Kal e-TcO-e* ical -?\v t] irTaxxts aurris jU.e7aA.7j. 
Mceso-Gothic of Ulfhilas. 
Jah at'iddja dalab rign jali qemun awos jah vaivoun vindos jah bistugqun 
bi jainamina razna jah gadraus jah vas drus Is mikils. 
Anglo-Saxon. 
Tha rinde hyt, and thaer com flod, and bleowon windas, and ahruron on 
thaet bus; and thaet bus feoll, and hys hryre was mycel. 

Wycliffe. 
And rayn came doun, and floodis camen, and wyndis blewen, and thei hur- 
liden in to that hous; and it felle doun, and the fallyng doun thereof was grete. 

Tyndale. 
And abundaunce of rayne descended, and the finddes came, and the wyndea 
blewe and beet vpon that housse, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. 
From Luke vi. 49. 

lj 7rpo<7e'<3p7)£ei/ b Trora/xhs^ not fude'aij eVecre, kcl\ tycyero rh bijyixa rrjs oi/ct'as iicetvy)$ 
(M<ya. 



166 ENGLISH OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

I cannot, upon this occasion, enter upon the history of 
the primary amalgamation of the incongruous elements 
which compose the English speech, for this would involve a 
minnteness of detail, and an amount of grammatical discus- 
sion, that could not be otherwise than fatiguing ; but it will 
not be irrelevant to our present purpose to make a few 
observations upon the change which took place in the four- 
teenth century, and which impressed upon our language many 
of the most striking features that distinguish it from the 
Anglo-Saxon. The work of Langland, called Piers Plough- 
man's Vision, and its sequel, the Creed, are of this century, 
but, both in poetic form and in vocabulary, they belong, not 
indeed to the Anglo-Saxon, but to the transition, or what may 
be called the tentative or experimental period, when the new 
speech was striving to detect and bring out its own latent 
affinities and tendencies. Besides, the diction and syntax of 
those works is marked by peculiarities which are, with ap- 
parently good reason, held to be characteristic rather of certain 
local dialects than of the general idiom of the period. Eng- 
lish literature must therefore be considered as commencing 
with the writings of "Wycliffe, Gower and Chaucer. The 



Mceso-Gothic of TJlphilas. 
batei bistagq flodus jah suns gadraus, jah varb so usvalteias bis raznis 
mikla. 

Anglo-Saxon. 
And thaet flod in-fieow, and hraedlice hyt afeoll ; anl wearth mycel hryre 
thaes huses. 

Wycliffe. 
In to which the flood was hurlid, and a non it felde doun ; ind the fallinge 
doun of that hous is maad greet. 

Tyndale. 
Agaynst which the fludde did bet ; and it fell by and by. And the fall of 
that housse was greate. 



DIALECT OF CHAUCER. 167 

adrance of Wycliffe* upon Langland is chiefly grammatical, 
not lexical ; at least, the difference in the proportion of foreign 
words used "by them respectively is inconsiderable. The in 
fluence of Continental secular literature, as distinguished from 
the style and diction of theological compositions, is hardly 
traceable in Wycliffe, but very conspicuous in his poetical 
contemporaries. The crown of England, in the best days of 
Edward III., numbered perhaps as many French as British 
subjects, and its Continental territory, where French only 
was native, was scarcely less extensive than its English soil. 
The two languages had existed in England side by side for 
three whole centuries, and the Norman dialect was the favor- 
ite speech of court and aristocratic life. That Chaucer, him- 
self a courtier, should have imbibed a large infusion of the 
French element, was natural, and copying, too, from foreign 
models and translating from foreign authors, it was inevita- 
ble that his diction should exhibit traces of French influence. 
Chaucer accordingly used a number of French and Gallicized 
Latin words not found in other English writers of his time, 
and there is no doubt that many of them have been retained, 
in place of equally appropriate and expressive Saxon terms, 
upon his authority. So far, therefore, the charge often pre- 
ferred against him of having alloyed the language by the in- 

* I am not disposed to allow that the name of Wycliffe was but a myth, the 
impersonation of a school of reformers, and I think we may well be slow in 
adopting the theory which reconciles the discrepancies between the different ac- 
counts of the life of the great English apostle, by the supposition that there 
were two or more Wycliffes, as in Greek mythology there was a plurality of 
Herakles. Still, the extreme uncertainty of the evidence which identifies any 
existing manuscript as an actual production of the translator Wycliffe, and the 
great stylistic differences between the works usually ascribed to him, require ua 
to use great caution in speaking of the characteristics of his diction. In gen- 
eral, when I cite the authority of Wycliffe, I refer to the elder of the two ver* 
sions of the New Testament printed in the Wycliffite translations, Oxford, 1850. 



168 ENGLISH OF THE FOURTEENTH 0ENTT3RY. 

troduction of French words and idioms, though by no means 
true in its whole extent, is not absolutely without foundation, 
but at the same time his syntax remained substantially and 
essentially Saxon, and a comparison of his poems with those 
of other writers of the period will show that the poetic dia 
lect of our speech, its flexibility, compass, and variety of ex- 
pression, were developed by him to such an extraordinary 
degree, that there are few instances in the history of litera- 
ture where a single writer has exerted so great, and in one 
direction at least, so beneficial an influence on the language 
of his time, as Chaucer. Langland, Gower, Chaucer, and 
WyclifTe belong chronologically to the same period, but the 
secular poets and the religious reformers moved in different 
spheres, addressed themselves to different audiences, and the 
vocabulary and style of each is modified by the circumstan- 
ces under which he wrote, and the subject on which he was 
employed. Gower and Chaucer, writing for ladies and cava- 
liers, used the phraseology most likely to be intelligible and 
acceptable to courtiers, while Wycliffe and the author of the 
Ploughman were aiming to bring before the popular mind' 
the word of God and the abuses of the church. The vocab- 
ulary of the reformers, both in prose and verse, is drawn al- 
most wholly from homely Anglo-Saxon and the habitual 
language of religious life, while the lays of Gower and 
Chaucer are more freely decorated with the flowers of an ex- 
otic and artificial phraseology.* Wycliffe and his associates, 



* Notwithstanding the amount of poetical embellishment in Chaucer's 
works, he actually employs a smaller percentage of Latin and French word? 
than the author of Piers Ploughman, though the general difference in this 
respect is perhaps less than the computation given in Lecture VI. would indicate. 
The dialect of Piers Ploughman has been popularly supposed to be more 
thoroughly Anglo-Saxon than that of Chaucer, because the former uses very 



ENGLISH OF -HE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 1G9 

in their biblical translations, use few foreign words not trans- 
planted directly from the Latin Vulgate, but in their own orig- 
inal writings, they employ as large a proportion of Romance 
vocables as occurs in those of Chaucer's works where they 
are most numerous. In the Squires Tale, nine per cent, of 
the words are of Continental origin, in the Konnes Prestes 
Tale the proportion falls to seven, while in the prose Per- 
sones Tale, a religious homily, it rises to eleven. The diction 
of Chaucer in the Persones Tale does not differ very essen- 
tially from that of other religious writers of the same period, 
and it is by no means the proportion of foreign words which 
distinguishes his poems from the common literary dialect of 
the times. It is the selection of his vocabulary, and the 
structure of his periods, that mark his style as his own, and 
it is a curious fact, that of the small number of foreign words 
employed by him and by Gower, a large share were in a 
manner forced upon them by the necessities of rhyme ; for 
while not less than ninety parts in a hundred of their vocab- 
ularies are pure Anglo-Saxon, more than one-fourth of the 
terminal words of their verses are Latin or French. 

Englishmen have sometimes looked back with regret to 
the loss of the splendid conquests of Edward III., and the 
older English provinces on the east and south of the channel, 
but there can be little doubt that the surrender of territory 
was a gain, so far as respects the unity and harmony of na- 
tional character, the development of the language, and the 
creation of an independent literature. The first effect of the 
great victories of that reign, no doubt, was to stimulate the 

many native words not found in the latter, and which are now obsolete; but in 
point of fact, Chaucer's style is quite as idiomatic as that of Langland, if tried 
Dy either an Anglo-Saxon or a modern English standard. 



170 ENGLISH OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

nationax pride of England, and to clothe eA ery thLig properly 
indigenous with new respectability and value. It is perhaps 
to this feeling that we are to ascribe the statute of the thirty- 
ninth year of Edward III., which prescribed that pleas should 
be pleaded, as well as debated and judged, in English, though 
they were to be enrolled in Latin. The self-conscious spirit 
of Anglo-Saxon nationality was for the moment thoroughly 
roused, but a large proportion of the nobility and gentry 
were of Norman extraction, and still attached to their hered- 
itary speech. The statute does not appear to have been much 
regarded in practice, and French and Latin continued to be 
the official languages, for a long time after. From the Nor- 
man Conquest to the twenty-fifth year of Edward L, 1297, all 
parliamentary enactments were recorded and promulgated in 
Latin. From that date to the third year of Henry YIL, in 
1487, they are almost wholly in French, and thereafter only 
in English, but the records of judicial proceedings were made 
up in Latin down to a much later date ; and in fact England 
was never thoroughly Anglicized, until its political connec- 
tion with the continent was completely severed. 

" Had the Plantagenets," observes Macaulay, " as at one 
time seemed likely, succeeded in uniting all France under 
their government, it is probable that England would never 
have had an independent existence. The noble language of 
Milton and Burke would have remained a rustic dialect with- 
out a literature, a fixed grammar, or a fixed orthography, and 
would have been contemptuously abandoned to the boors. 
No man of English extraction would have risen to eminence, 
except by becoming in speech and in habits a Frenchman." 

Analogous, though certainly not identical, consequences, 

would t have followed from the failure of the Reformers to re- 
t 



ENGLISH OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 171 

lease England from her allegiance to the Papal see ; for the 
mighty intellectual struggle, which shook Christendom in the 
sixteenth century, had a powerful influence in rousing the 
English mind to vigorous action, throwing it back on its own 
resources, and compelling it to bring out whatever of strength 
and efficiency was inherent in the national mind and the na- 
tional speech. Tyndale's Testament was, for its time, as im- 
portant a gift to the English people, as was King James's 
translation, of which indeed Tyndale's forms the staple, four- 
score years later, and in the theological controversies of that 
century our mother-tongue acquired and put forth a compass 
of vocabulary, a force and beauty of diction, and a power of 
precise logical expression, of which scarce any other Euro- 
pean tongue was then capable, and which the best English 
writers of later centuries can hardly be said to have sur- 
passed. 



LECTUEE VIII. 



THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



The Anglo-Saxon represents at once the material sub* 
stratum and the formative principle of the English language. 
You may eliminate all the other ingredients, and there still 
subsists a speech, of itself sufficient for all the great purposes 
of temporal and spiritual life, and capable of such growth 
and development from its own native sources, and by its own 
inherent strength, as to fit it also for all the factitious wants 
and new-found conveniences of the most artificial stages of 
human society. If, on the other hand, you strike out the 
Saxon element, there remains but a jumble of articulate 
sounds without coherence, syntactic relation, or intelligible 
significance. But though possessed of this inexhaustible 
mine of native metal, we have rifled the whole orbis verbo- 
rum, the world of words, to augment our overflowing stores, 
so that every speech and nation under heaven has contributed 
some jewels to enrich our cabinet, or, at the least, some hum- 
ble implement to facilitate the communication essential to the 
proper discharge of the duties, and the performance of the 
labors, of moral and material life. These foreign conquests, 



LOSSES AND GAINS OF ENGLISH. 



173 



indeed, have not been achieved, these foreign treasures won, 
without some shedding of Saxon blood, some sacrifice of do- 
mestic coin, and if we have gained largely in vocabulary, we 
have, for the time at least, lost no small portion of that orig- 
inal constructive power, whereby we could have fabricated 
a nomenclature scarcely less wide and diversified than that 
which we have borrowed from so distant and multiplied 
sources. English no longer exercises, though we may hope 
it still possesses, the protean gift of transformation, which 
could at pleasure verbalize a noun, whether substantive or 
adjective, and the contrary ; we have dropped the variety of 
significant endings, which indicated not only the grammatical 
character, but the grammatical relations, of the words of the 
period, and with them sacrificed the power of varying the 
arrangement of the sentence according to the emphasis, so as 
always to use the right word in the right place ; we have 
suffered to perish a great multitude of forcible descriptive 
terms ; and finally we no longer enjoy the convenience of 
framing at pleasure new words out of old and familiar mate- 
rial, by known rules of derivation and composition, but are 
able to increase our vocabulary only by borrowing from for- 
eign and, for the most part, unallied sources. Nevertheless, 
in the opinion of able judges, our gains, upon the whole, so 
far at least as the vocabulary is concerned, more than bal- 
ance our losses. Our language has become more copious, 
more flexible, more refined, and capable of greater philosophi- 
cal precision, and a wider variety of expression. 

The introduction of foreign words and foreign idioms has 
made English less easy of complete mastery to ourselves, and 
its mixed character is one reason why, in general, even edu- 
cated English and Americans speak less well than Continental 



174 LOSSES OF ENGLISH. 

scholars ; but, on the other hand, the same composite struc* 
ture renders it less difficult for foreigners, and thus it is emi- 
nently fitted to be the speech of two nations, one of which 
counts among its subjects, the other among its citizens, peo- 
ple of every language and every clime. 

Our losses are greatest in the poetic dialect, nor have 
they, in this department, except for didactic and epic verse, 
been at all balanced by our acquisitions from the Latin and 
the French, or rather from the former through the latter. 
We have suffered in the vocabulary suited to idyllic and to 
rural poetry, in the language of the domestic affections, and 
the sensibilities of every-day social life. In short, while the 
nomenclature of art has been enriched, the voice of nature has 
grown thin and poor, and at the same time, in the loss of the 
soft inflections of the Saxon grammar, English prosody has 
sustained an injury which no variety of foreign terminations 
can compensate. The recovery and restoration of very many 
half-forgotten and wholly unsupplied Saxon words, and of 
some of the melodious endings which gave such variety and 
charm to rhyme, is yet possible, and it is here that I look for 
one of the greatest benefits to our literature from the study 
of our ancient mother-tongue. Even Chaucer, whom a 
week's labor will make almost as intelligible as Dryden,/ 
might furnish our bards an ample harvest, and a knowledge 
of the existing remains of Anglo-Saxon literature would en- 
able us to give to our poetic vocabulary and our rhythm 
a compass and a beauty surpassed by that of no modern 
tongue. It is remarkable that Ben Jonson, in lamenting the 
disappearance of the old verbal plural ending -en, as, they 
loven, they complainen, instead of they love, they complain, 
a form which he says he " dares not presume to set afoot 



LOSSES OF ENGLISH. 175 

again, though the lack thereof, well considered, will be found 
a great blemish to our tongue," should confine the expression 
of his regret solely to the loss of a grammatical sign, without 
adverting to the superior rhythmical beauty and convenience 
of the obsolete form. Early English inherited from the Sax 
on numerous terminations of case, number and person, witl 
an obscure vowel or liquid final, constituting trochaic feet, 
and the loss of these has compelled us to substitute spondaic 
measures to an extent which singularly interferes with the 
melody of our versification. Thus in Chaucer's time, the 
adjectives all, small, and the like, and the preterite of the 
strong verbs, had a form in e obscure, which served as a sign 
of the plural. The e final in these and other words was ar- 
ticulated as it now is in French poetry, except before words 
beginning with a vowel or with h, and thus what we should 
write and pronounce, prosaically, 

And small fowls make melody 

That sleep all the night with open eye, 

becomes metrical as written by Chaucer, and pronounced by 
his contemporaries : 

And smalg fowled maken mgl5dle, 
Th5t slepen al the night with open yhe. 

But this point will be more properly considered in a subse- 
quent part of our course. 

It has been observed in all literatures, that the poetry and 
the prose which take the strongest hold of the heart of a na- 
tion are usually somewhat archaic in diction ; behind, rather 
than in advance of, the fashionable language of the time. 
The reason of this is that the great mass of every people ia 
slow to adopt changes in its vocabulary. New words aflfc 



176 ARCHAIC DICTION. 

introduced, and long exclusively employed in circles that are 
rather excrescences upon society than essential constituents 
of it, while old words cling to the tongue of the stable mul- 
titude, and are understood and felt by it long after they have 
ceased to be current and intelligible among the changeful 
coteries that assume to dictate the speech, as well as the opin- 
ions and the manners, of their generation. Deep in the re- 
cesses of our being, beneath even the reach of consciousness, 
or at least of objective self-inspection, there lies a certain 
sensibility to the organic laws of our mother-tongue, and to 
the primary significance of its vocabulary, which tells us 
when obsolete, unfamiliar words are fitly used, and the logical 
power of interpreting words by the context acts with the 
greatest swiftness and certainty, when it is brought to bear 
on the material of our native speech. The popular mind 
shrinks from new words, as from aliens not yet rightfully 
entitled to a place in our community, while antiquated and 
half-forgotten native vocables, like trusty friends returning 
after an absence so long that their features are but dimly 
remembered, are welcomed with double warmth, when once 
their history and their worth are brought back to our recollec- 
tion. So tenaciously do ancient words and ancient forms ad- 
here to the national mind, that persons of little culture, but 
good linguistic perceptions, will not unfrequently follow old 
English or Scottish authors with greater intelligence than 
grammarians trained to the exact study of written forms, 
and I have known self-educated women, who read Chaucer 
and Burns with a relish and an appreciation rare among per- 
Bons well schooled in classic lore. 

Doubtless the too free use of archaisms is an abuse, but 
the errors which have been committed by modern writers in 



ARCHAIC DICTION. 177 

this way have generally "been not so much in employing too 
large a proportion of older words, as in applying them to 
new objects, thoughts, and conditions. 

The author of " Nothing to Wear " would have committed 
a serious violation of the laws of propriety and good taste, 
if he had adopted the dialect of the sixteenth century in that 
fine satire, to which, what is currently called the local color 
of the composition gives so much point. On the other hand, 
the judicious use of antiquated words and forms in the Cas- 
tle of Indolence, an imaginative conception altogether in har- 
mony with the tone of an earlier age, has clothed that ex- 
quisite creation with a charm which renders it more attractive 
than almost any other poetical production of the last century. 

The English author who has most affected archaism of 
phraseology is Spenser, but if he had confined himself to thd 
use of roots and inflections which ever were true English, in- 
stead of coining words and forms to suit his metre and his 
rhyme, he would have escaped something of the censure 
which his supposed too conservative love of the reverend and 
the old brought upon him, at the close of a period during 
which, more than ever after the time of Chaucer, the lan- 
guage had been in a state of metamorphosis and transition.* 

* Spencer wanted not able defenders in his own time, and the argument of 
one of them is worth listening to as an exposition of the views of a good scholar, 
at an important crisis in the history of the English language, and as in itself a 
characteristic specimen of the euphuism which was then a fashionable style of 
literary composition. 

" And first of the wordes to spcake," I graunt they bee something hard, and 
of most men unused, yet both English, and also used of most excellent authours, 
and most famous poets. On whom, when as this our Poet both bin much tra- 
vailed and thoroughly read, how could it be, (as that wort hie Oratour sayde,) 
but that walking in the Sunne, although for other cause he walked, yet needef 
he mought be sunburnt ; and having the sound of those auncient poets still ring 
ing in his cares, he mought needes, in singing, hit out some of their tunes. 
12 



178 ARCHAIC DICTION. 

Ben Jonson sings : 

"Then it chimes, 
When the old words do strike on the new times/' 

and he has happily conceived, and happily expressed in prose, 
the true rule for the selection of words in writings designed 
for permanence of duration and effect. 

" We must not," says he, " be too frequent with the mint, 
every day coining, nor fetch words from the extreme and ut- 
most ages. Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of 

Sure I thinke, and thinke I think not amisse, that they bring great grace, 
and, as one would say, authoritie to the verse. For albe, amongst many other 
faults, it specially be obiected of Valla against Livie, and of other against 
Salust, that with over much studie they affect antiquitie, as covering thereby 
credence and honour of elder yeares ; yet I am of opinion, and eke the best 
learned are of the like, that those auncient solemne words are a great ornament, 
both in the one, and in the other. 

Ofttimes an ancient worde maketh the stile seeme grave, and as it were rev- 
erend, no otherwise than we honor and reverence gray haires for a certaine re- 
ligious regard which we have of old age. 

But if any will rashly blame his purpose in choice of olde and unwonted 
wordes, him may I more iustly blame and condemne, or of witlesse headiness in 
iudging, or of heedless hardiness in condemning, for in my opinion it is one 
especiall praise, of many which are due to this poet, that he hath labored to 
restore as to their rightful heritage such good and naturall English wordes, as 
have beene long time out of use, and almost cleane disherited. Which is the 
only cause, that our mother-tongue, which truly of itself is both full inough for 
prose and stately enough for verse, hath long time beene counted most bare and 
barren of both. Which default when as some endeavoured to salve and recure, 
they patched up the holes with peeces and rags of other languages, borrowing 
here of the French, there of the Italian, every where of the Latin; not weigh- 
ing how all these tongues accord with themselves but much worse with ours: 
so now they have made our English tong a gallimaufry, or hodge-podge of all 
olher speeches. 

Other, some not so well seene in the English tongue, as perhaps in other 
languages, if they happen to hear an olde word, albeit very naturall and sig- 
nificant, cry out straightway, that we speake no English but gibberish, or rather 
Biich as in olde time Evander's mother spake ; whose first shame is that they 
are not ashamed, in their own mother-tongue to be counted strangers and aliens. 
The second shame no less than the first, that whatso they understand not, the} 
Btreightway deeme to be senselesse and not at all to be understoode." 



CHANGES EN VOCABULARY. 179 

majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes. 
For they have the authority of years, and out of their iner- 
mission do win to themselves a kind of grace-like newness. 
But the eldest of the present, and newest of the past lan- 
guage is best." 

To ascertain the number of words in use at any given 
time, is a matter of great difficulty. As I have observed in 
a former lecture, new words are constantly making their ap- 
pearance, and of these, while the greater part are forgotten 
with the occasions which produced them, some, from the great 
importance and abiding influence of those events, or from 
their own inherent expressiveness, become permanent addi- 
tions to the language. The introduction of new words can 
scarcely fail to be marked, but the disappearance of old and 
established expressions is not a thing of so easy observation. 
The mere non-user of a word is not likely to be noticed until 
it has been so long out of currency that it strikes us as un- 
familiar, when met with in authors of an earlier period. Nor 
does the fact, that a word is not actually employed at a par- 
ticular epoch, prove it to be permanently obsolete. 

Multa jenascentur quae jam cecidere, cadentque, 
QusenuDC sunt iu honore vocabula. 

Words are constantly passing temporarily out of use, and 
resuming their place in literature again, and this occasional 
suspended animation of words, followed by a revival and 
restoration to full activity, is one of the most curious facts in 
their history. But this subject belongs to another part of our 
course, and we shall resume it hereafter. We can never 
overlook at once our whole contemporaneous literature, and 
of course we can never say how extensive its active vocabu- 



180 CHANGES IN MEANING OF WORDS. 

laiy is, nor how far its gains, which we see and can estimate, 
are compensated by losses which escape our notice. Such 
computations no generation can make for itself, and the bal- 
ance can be struck only by the successor. 

There is one verbal revolution which is more within the 
scope of familiar observation. I refer to that change by 
which words once refined, elegant and even solemn, come to 
suggest trivial, vulgar, or ludicrous thoughts or images. Spen- 
ser, in speaking of an encounter between two armies or single 
knights, often says, they "let drive, or, rushed full drive, at 
each other," and both he and later writers, even to the time 
of Dryden, describe, in pathetic passages, a lady as having 
her face " blubbered with tears." The phrase " not to be 
named the same day," now a vulgarism, occurs in Abel Red- 
ivivus ; and the grave Hooker warns sinners of the danger of 
" popping down into the pit." Fellow, originally meaning sim- 
ply a companion, is now a term of offence. Hooker and 
Shakspeare use companion, now become respectable, as we 
do fellow, and it is remarkable that in almost all the Euro- 
pean languages, the word corresponding to fellow is employed 
chiefly in a disparaging signification. 

When a distinguished American politician expressed a 
willingness, under certain circumstances, to " let the Consti- 
tution slide," he was criticised almost as severely for the un- 
dignified character of the expression, as for the supposed 
unpatriotic sentiment ; but he had the authority of Chaucer 
and Shakspeare for the language, if not for the thought. 
Young Lord "Walter, in the Clerkes Tale, was so devoted to 
hawking, that 

Wei neigh all other cures let he slyde; 



CHANGES IN USE OF WOEDS. 1S1 

the disconsolate Dorigene in the Frankeleines Tale was fain 
at last to 

Lcte hire sorwe slide ; 

and Sly, in the Taming of the Shrew, 

Lets the world slide. 

"Very many humble colloquialisms current in this country, 
but not now used in England, and generally supposed to be 
Americanisms, are, after all, of good old British family, and 
our Eastern friends, who are sometimes ridiculed for talking 
of a sight of people, may find comfort in learning that the 
famous old romance, the prose Morte d' Arthur, uses this word 
for multitude, and that the high-born dame, Juliana Berners, 
lady prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell in the fifteenth 
century, informs us that in her time a oomynahle syght of 
monhes was elegant English for, i a large company of friars.' 

No living language yet possesses a dictionary so complete 
a? to give all the words in use at any one period, still less all 
those that have belonged to it during the whole extent of its 
litf.rary history. We cannot therefore arrive at any precise 
results as to the comparative copiousness of our own and other 
languages, but there is reason to think that the vocabulary of 
English is among the most extensive now employed by man. 

The number of English words not yet obsolete, but found 
in good authors, or in approved usage by correct speakers, 
including the nomenclature of science and the arts, does not 
probably fall short of one hundred thousand. Now there 
are persons who know this vocabulary in nearly its whole 
extent, but they understand a large proportion of it much as 
they are acquainted with Greek or Latin, that is, as the dia- 
lect of books, or of special arts or professions, and not as a 



182 EXTENT OF VOCABULARY 

living speech, the common language of daily and hourlv 
thought. Or if, like some celebrated English and American 
orators, living and dead, they are able, upon occasion, to bring 
into the field in the war of words even the half of this vast 
array of light and heavy troops, yet they habitually content 
themselves with a much less imposing display of verbal force, 
and use for ordinary purposes but a very small proportion of 
the words they have at their command. Out of our immense 
magazine of words, and their combinations, every man selects 
his own implements and weapons, and we should find in the 
verbal repertory of each individual, were it once fairly laid 
open to us, a key that would unlock many mysteries of his 
particular humanity, many secrets of his private history. 

Few writers or speakers use as many as ten thousand 
words, ordinary persons of fair intelligence not above three or 
four thousand. If a scholar were to be required to name, 
without examination, the authors whose English vocabulary 
was the largest, he would probably specify the all-embracing 
Shakspeare, and the all-knowing Milton. And yet in all 
the works of the great dramatist, there occur not more than 
fifteen thousand words, in the poems of Milton not above 
eight thousand. The whole number of Egyptian hieroglyphic 
symbols does not exceed eight hundred, and the entire Italian 
operatic vocabulary is said to be scarcely more extensive. 

To those whose attention has not been turned to the sub- 
ject, these are surprising facts, but if we run over a few 
pages of a dictionary, and cbserve how great a proportion 
of the words are such as we do not ourselves individually 
use, we shall be forced to conclude that we each find a very 
limited vocabulary sufficient for our own purposes. Al though 
we have few words absolutely synonymous, yet every impor* 



VOCABULARY OF INDIVIDUALS. 1S3 

tant thought, image, and feeling, lias numerous allied, if not 
equivalent forms of expression, and out of these every man 
appropriates and almost exclusively employs those which 
most closely accord with his own mental constitution, his 
tastes and opinions, the style of his favorite authors, or which 
best accommodate themselves to the rest of his habitual phra- 
seology. One man will say a thankful heart, another a 
grateful spirit; one usually employs fancy where another 
would say imaginabion y one describes a friend as a person 
of a sanguine temperament, another speaks of him as a man of 
a hopeful spirit y one regards a winter passage around Capo 
Horn as a very hazardous voyage, another considers it & pe- 
culiarly dangerous trip. One man begins to build, another 
commences building * Men of moderate passions employ 
few epithets, with verbs and substantives of mild significa- 
tions ; excitable men use numerous intensives, and words 
of strong and stirring meanings. Loose thinkers content 
themselves with a single expression for a large class of re- 
lated ideas ; logical men scrupulously select the precise word 
which corresponds to the thought they utter, and yet among 
persons of but average intelligence, each understands, though 
not himself employing, the vocabulary of all the rest. The 
demands of pure and of physical science, and of mechanical 
art, for a more extended nomenclature, wherewith to chron- 
icle their progress, and aid in their diffusion, are at present 

* Commence is used by good writers only as a transitive verb, and as such 
requires the participle or participial noun, not the infinitive, after it. The phrase 
I commence to build, now occasionally employed, is therefore not sanctioned by 
respectable authority. At the same time, there is no valid gramr.iatical objec- 
tion to its use. The French, from whom -we borrowed this verb, say commencer 
d parlor, or commencer de parler, according to circumstances, and our restriction 
of it to a technically transitive character is purely conventional. 



1S4 TECHNICAL TEEMS. 

giving occasion to a more ample coinage cf new words than 
are supplied from any other source. Science, with the ex- 
ception of Geology, borrows its vocabulary chiefly from 
Greek and Latin sources ; mechanical art, to some extent 
from the same languages, but it has more generally taken its 
technical terms from native, though often very obscure, roots. 
The number of words of art which the last half century has 
thus introduced into English is very great, and a large pro- 
portion of them are sought for in vain in our most volumi- 
nous dictionaries. Indeed, it is surprising how slowly the 
commonest mechanical terms find their way into dictionaries 
professedly complete. I may mention, as instances of this, 
that penny, a denomination of the sizes of nails, as a six- 
penny, or a ten-penny nail, though it was employed by Featly 
two hundred years ago, and has been in constant use ever 
since, is not to be found in Webster ; * and the great French 



* " He fell fierce and foule upon the Pope himselfe, threatning to loosen 
him from his chayre, though he were fastened thereto with a tenpeny naile." — 
Life of Abbot, Abel Redivivus, 546. 

Six-penny, eight-penny, ten-penny nails, are nails of such sizes, that a thousand 
will weigh six, eight, or ten pounds, and in this phrase, therefore, penny seems 
to be a corruption of pound. See App. 30. 

There is another very common and very proper expression, which the dic- 
tionaries and the sciolistic pride of precisians in speech reject as a vulgar inac- 
curacy. The phrase a pair of stairs is used by Palsgrave, Hakluyt, Shakespeare, 
and George Sandys, and it is found in the Memoirs of Scviblerus, as well as in 
many English classics of the best age of our literature. The fancied incorrect- 
ness lies in a supposed misapprehension of the meaning of stair, which those 
who criticize the phrase imagine to be synonymous with step or tread. But 
this is a mistake. The Anglo-Saxon staeger, whence our stair, is derived 
from the verb stigan, to ascend or climb, which, in the form sty or stie, was 
in use as an English verb as late as the time of Spenser. Stfeger and stair> 
though sometimes confounded with step, properly signify alike the entire 
system of successive steps by which we sty or climb from one floor to another. 



SCIENTIFIC VOCABULARY. 185 

and Italian dictionary of Alberti, in the edition of 1835, doe3 
not contain the word for steam-boat in either language. 

The vocabulary of science is founded upon the necessity, 
partly of new names for new things, and partly of more pre- 
cise and exclusive designation of well-known things. It is 
obvious that w T hen chemistry discovers a new element or ele- 
mentary combination, physics a new law or principle, mathe- 
matics a new mode of ascertaining magnitudes or comparing 
quantities, new words must be coined in order properly to 
express the object discovered, or process invented ; but the 
need of new terms for familiar things, or properties of things, 
is not so dear to common apprehension.. It is not at first 
sight evident that a botanist, in describing a smooth, shaggy, 
or bristly, vegetable surface, is under the necessity of saying 
instead, that the leaf or stalk is glabrous, hirsute, or hispid, 
but a sufficient reason for the introduction of new terms into 
newly organized branches of knowledge, is to be found in the 
fact, that the common words of every living speech are pop- 
ularly used in several distinct acceptations, some proper and 
some figurative. The purposes of natural science require that 
its nomenclature shall be capable of exact definition, and 
that every descriptive technical term be rigorously limited 

and they may therefore be considered as collective nouns. Thus Milton, Para- 
dise Lost, in., 540-3 : 

Satan from hence, now on the lower stair, 
That scaled by steps of gold to heaven gate, 
Looks down with wonder at the sudden view 
Of all this world at once. 
But it is usual to divide the stair, when the height of the stories is consid- 
erable, into flights or sections separated by landing-places, and each flight might 
not improperly be considered an independent stair. Now in the great majority 
of stairs, there was but one intermediate landing-place, and of course the whole 
ascent from floor to floor was divided into two flights or stairs, and thus formed 
%pair of Stair*. Sec Appendix, 32. 



180 SCIENTIFIC VOCABULARY 

to the expression of the precise quality or mode of action to 
the designation of which it is applied. Now, though smooth, 
shaggy, and bristly, may be, and often are, employed in senses 
precisely equivalent to those of glabrous, hirsute, and hispid, 
yet they have also other meanings and shades of meaning, 
and are almost always more or less vague in their sig- 
nification, because, being relative in their nature, they are 
constantly referred to different standards of comparison. The 
Latin words which, in the dialect of botany, replace them, 
have, on the contrary, no signification except that which is 
imposed upon them by strict definition, and no degree of sig- 
nification which is not fixed by reference to known and in- 
variable types. 

In a recent scientific journal, I find this sentence : " Be- 
goniacese, by their anthero-connectival fabric indicate a close 
relationship with anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphseoid forms, 
an affinity confirmed by the serpentarioid flexuoso-nodulous 
stem, the liriodendroid stipules, and cissoid and victorioid 
foliage of a certain Begonia, and if considered hypogynous, 
would, in their triquetrous capsule, alate seed, apetalism, and 
tufted stamination, represent the floral fabric of Nepenthes, 
itself of aristolochioid affinity, while by its pitchered leaves, 
directly belonging to Sarracenias and Dionseas." 

This extract exemplifies, in an instructive way, the appli- 
cation of new words to objects and features familiar in them- 
selves, but which have only recently acquired a scientific 
value, and is interesting as showing to what extent the for- 
mation of compound and derivative words may be carried in 
English, when employed in the service of natural knowledge. 
Most of the descriptive epithets are derived from the scientific 
appellations of known species or genera, the names of which 



TECHNICAL TERMS. 187 

suggest to the botanist their characteristic forms. Where the 
particular form is common to two or three, the names of all 
are grouped in one compound, and the whole word termi 
nated with the Greek syllable -oid, expressive of likeness. 

The nomenclature of science is often so repugnant to the 
ear, and so refractory to the tongue of our Anglican race, 
that it never finds admission into the dialect of common life, 
but as the principles of abstract reasoning, and the facts of 
natural knowledge become more widely diffused, much of 
the vocabulary which belonged originally to the schools, es- 
capes from its learned seclusion, and, generally with more or 
less modification of meaning, finally incorporates itself into 
the common language, the familiar speech of the people. 
At present the predominance of scientific pursuits is bestow- 
ing upon English a great number of words borrowed from 
the nomenclature, both of the various branches of natural 
history, and of the more exact sciences of pure and mixed math- 
ematics. Thus, conditions, in the sense of the circumstances 
under which a given phenomenon takes place, and which 
may be supposed to modify its character, problem, corollary, 
phenomenon, quantitative and qualitative, demonstrative, pos- 
itive and negative, the mean between extremes, antipodal, ze- 
nith, inverse ratio, and hundreds of other terms lately intro- 
duced for the special purposes of science, and denoting new, 
or at least unfamiliar things and relations of things, have now 
become a part of the general vocabulary of all educated 
persons.* 

* Exorbitant, the Latin conjugate verb to -which, exorbito, acquired a 
popular figurative sense even in the classic age of Rome, was originally a term 
of art applied to those heavenly bodies whose path deviated much from the 
plane of the orbits of the planets most familiar to ancient astronomy. It has 
now lost its technical meaning altogether, and has no longer a place in ihe dia 
*ct of science. 



188 TECHNICAL TEEMS. 

Ill the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the questions 
which absorbed the thoughts of men, and shook the dynas* 
ties of Europe, were not those immediately affecting material 
interests, but those concerning the relations of man to his 
Maker, and of the subject to his rulers. Theology and civil 
polity, and, as a necessary -preparation for the comprehension 
of both, metaphysical studies, were the almost exclusive pur- 
suit of the great thinkers, the active intellects of that long 
period. The facts, the arguments, the authorities which bore 
upon these questions, were principally to be sought for in the 
ancient languages, and when the reasoning was to be em- 
ployed to influence the unlearned, to be clothed in an Eng- 
lish dress, and to be popularized, so to speak, it was at once 
discovered that the existing language was destitute of ap- 
propriate words to convey ideas so new to the English mind. 
The power of forming new words from indigenous roots by 
composition and derivation, retained by the cognate lan- 
guages, had been lost or suspended in English, and, more- 
over, the Saxon primitives specially adapted for employment 
in this way, had been superseded by French words imported 
by the Norman nobility, or by a sectarian Latin phraseology 
introduced by the Romish ecclesiastics. Hence new voca- 
bles, and those almost uniformly of Greek or Latin etymolo- 
gy, were coined for use in theological and political discussion, 
and many of them soon became a constituent part of the 
general medium of thought. In fact, a complete English 
metaphysical nomenclature was formed, and freely and fa- 
miliarly used, by the great thinkers who lived in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. Li the materialistic age which 
followed, such portion of this vocabulary as was not already 
incorporated into the universal patrimony of the language, 



TECHNICAL TEEMS. J S3 

had become obsolete, and when, fifty years ago, Coleridge 
attempted to revive the forgotten study of metaphysics, he 
found that the current dialect of the day afforded no terms 
for the adequate expression of logical and philosophical cat- 
egories. But a recurrence to the religious philosophy of a 
more intellectual age showed that the English metaphysicians 
of that period had in great part anticipated a nomenclature, 
which has been supposed to be the invention of German spec- 
ulators and their followers. Reason and understanding, as 
words denominative of distinct faculties, the adjectives sen- 
suous, transcendental, subjective and objective, supernatural, 
as an appellation of the spiritual, or that immaterial essence 
which is not subject to the law of cause and effect, and is 
thus distinguished from that which is natural, are all words 
revived, not invented by the school of Coleridge.* 

In the mean time, and down to the present day, the rapid 
progress of physical science and industrial art has given 
birth to a great multitude of technical terms, a large part 
of which, in more or less appropriate applications, or in figu- 
rative senses, has entered into the speech of every-day life. 
Thus the means of articulate and written communication 



* The following extract from Sir Kenelm Digby's Observations on Sir Thoma9 
Browne's Religio Medici is, both in manner and in matter, worthy o f some 
much later metaphysicians. 

" If God should join the Soul of a lately dead man, (even whilest his dead 
corps should lie entire in his winding sheet here,) unto a body made of earth 
taken from some mountain in America, it were most true and certain that the 
body he then sliou'd live by, were the same identical body he lived with before 
his de.ith and late resurrection. It is evident that aameyiess, thisness, and that- 
ness, belongeth not to matter by itself, (for a general indifference runneth 
through it all ;) but only as it is distinguished and individuated by the form, 
which in our case whensoever the soul doth, it must be understood always to be 
Ihe same matter and body." 



190 POPULAR VOCABULARY. 

upon more familiar as well as more recondite subjects have 
been vastly extended, even since the period when Shake- 
speare showed, by an experimental test, that English was 
already capable of exhibiting almost every conceivable phase 
of internal and external being in onr common humanity. 

The permanent literature of a given period is not a true 
index of the general vocabulary of the period, for the ex- 
emption of a great work from the fleeting interests and pas- 
sions, that inspire the words of its own time, is one of the 
very circumstances that insure its permanence. That which 
is to live for ever must appeal to more catholic and lasting 
sympathies than those immediately belonging to the special 
concerns of any era, however pregnant it may be with great 
consequences to the weal or the woe of man. 

The dialects of the field, the market, and the fireside in 
former ages have left but an imperfect record behind them, 
and they are generally to be traced only in the scanty pages 
of the comic dramatist, and in the few fragments of private 
correspondence that antiquarian curiosity has rescued from 
destruction. But, for a century, the historical novel, and the 
periodical press, in its various forms of newspaper, solid re- 
view and light magazine, have embodied the mutable speech 
of the hour, in its widest range of vocabulary, phraseological 
expression, and proverb. While, therefore, we do not possess 
satisfactory means of testing the humors, the aims, the mor- 
als, of our remoter ancestors by the character of their famil- 
iar speech, we have, in the lighter literature of later years, 
ample means of detecting the unconscious expression of the 
mental and moral tendencies, which have marked the age of 
our fathers and our own. 



LECTURE IX. 

VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

II. 

For the purpose of obtaining a comprehensive view of 
particular branches of knowledge, and of determining the 
special relations which subsist between them all, modern 
science has found the form of generalization termed classify 
cation, a very efficient, not to say a necessary, instrument. 
In fact orderly, and what may be called progressive, ar- 
rangement, is considered so essential a feature in all scientific 
method, that the principles of classification have been made 
the subject of much profound investigation and philosophic 
discussion, and they may be said to have been erected into a 
science of themselves. As an auxiliary to the comprehension 
of a given classification, and especially as a help to the mem- 
ory in retaining it, a systematic, and, as some hold, so far as 
possible, a descriptive, nomenclature is indispensable. The 
wide range of recent physical science, and the extent to which, 
in its various applications, it enters into and pervades the 
social life of the age, have made its dialect in some sort a 
common medium of intercommunication between men of 
different races and tongues. And thus Linnaeus, the father 



192 SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 

of modern botany and zoology, and Lavoisier, who occupies 
a scarcely less conspicuous position in the history of modern 
chemistry, have indirectly exercised almost as important an 
influence on the language, as, directly, upon the science of 
succeeding generations. A full discussion of the principles 
of scientific nomenclature would be too wide a digression 
from the path of inquiry marked out for the present course, 
but it will be useful to notice some misapplications of them, 
and I shall have occasion to recur again to the subject, in 
treating of the parts of speech.* 

I will precede what I have now to say in relation to it, by 
some remarks on the classification of languages, and on deriva- 
tion and composition in English. Languages have been va- 
riously classed according to their elements, their structure, 
their power of self-development, their historical origin or 
their geographical distribution. But the application of 
scientific principle to the comparison of different languages, 
or families of language, is so new a study that no one system 
of arrangement can yet be said to have received the assent 
of scholars, in any other way than as a provisional distribu- 
tion. The nomenclature of the different branches of linguis- 
tic knowledge, phonology, derivative etymology, inflection 
and syntax, is perhaps still more unsettled, and almost every 
Continental grammarian proposes a new set of names for 
even the parts of speech. So far is the passion for anatomiz- 
ing, describing and naming carried, that some philologists, 
s for instance Becker, divide, subdivide, distinguish and 
specify language and its elements, until it is almost a greater 
effort to master and retain the analysis and its nomenclature, 

* See Lecture XIV. 



DERIVATION OF WORDS. 193 

than to learn the grammatical forms and syntactical rules of 
the speech to which they are applied. I doubt the practical 
value of methods so artificial as to elevate the technicalities 
of art above art itself, and I shall, throughout this course, 
which I have more than once described as altogether intro- 
ductory and preparatory, confine myself, as far as practica- 
ble, to old and familiar appellations of all that belongs to the 
description of language and the elements which compose it. 

Among the various classifications of language, not the 
most scientific, certainly, but one of the most obvious, is that 
which looks at them with reference to their power of enlarg- 
ing their vocabulary by varying and compounding native 
radicals, or in other words, their organic law of growth. 
This classification is incomplete, because it respects words 
considered as independent and individual, leaving syntactical 
structure and other important points altogether out of view ; 
but, as we are now considering the vocabulary, it is, for our 
present purpose, the most convenient arrangement. 

Derivation, in its broadest sense, includes all processes 
by which new words are formed from given roots. In ordi- 
nary language, however, grammatical inflections are not em- 
braced in the term, and it may be added, that where the 
primitive and the derivative belong to the same language, 
there is usually a change of form, a change of grammatical 
class, and a change of relative import.* I shall, at present, 
speak only of derivation from native roots. A radical, which, 
in its simplest form and use, serves only as an attributive, in 

* There is not always a change of form,, as will be seen hereafter, nor is 
there necessarily a change of grammatical class. The noun auctioneer is de- 
rived from the noun auction; and again, since is derived from sithence, and 
that from a still older form, without any change of either class or meaning. 
See Lecture XIV. 

13 



194 DERIVATION OF WCRDS. 

other words an adjective, may be made to denote the quality 
which it ascribes, or an act by which that quality is man- 
ifested or imparted, and thus become a noim or a verb ; or 
contrariwise, a root which affirms the doing of an act, the 
being in a state, or the consciousness of a sensation or emo- 
tion, and of course a verb, may become the name of an 
agent, a quality or a condition. Thus, to take the first case 
supposed, red is the simplest form in which that root is 
known to the English language, and in that form it is an 
adjective denoting that the object to which it is applied pos- 
sesses a certain color. If we add to this root the syllable 
-ness, forming the derivative redness, the new word means 
the power of producing upon the eye the sensation excited 
by red objects ; it becomes the name of that color, and is a sub- 
stantive. If instead of that ending, we add the syllable -den, 
which gives us redden, the derivative signifies to become red, or 
to make red, and is a verb. So in the other case, the verb ad- 
mire, (which for the present purpose may be treated as a rad- 
ical,) signifying to regard with wonder or surprise mingled 
with respect or affection, by the addition of the consonant -r, 
becomes a substantive, admirer, and denotes a person enter- 
taining the sentiment I have just defined. In the form ad- 
miration, it is also a substantive, indicating the consciousness 
or expression of that sentiment, and if changed to admirable, 
it becomes an adjective expressing the possession of qualities 
which excite admiration, or entitle objects to be admired. In 
all these cases, the modified words are said to be derived 
from, or to be derivatives of, the simple radical, and they are 
changed in form by the addition of a syllable. But the 
change of form may be made in a different way, namely, by 
the substitution of other letters, usually vowels, for some of 



DERIVATION OF WORDS. JOS 

those of the radical. Thus from the verb bind, we have, by 
a change of vowel, the substantives band and bond, all ex- 
pressing the same radical notion ; from the verb think, by a 
change of both vowel and consonant, the substantive thovght / 
from the verb see, by a like change, the substantive sight • 
from the verb to freeze, the substantive frost / from the sub- 
stantives glass and grass, by a change of the spoken not the 
written vowel, the verbs to glaze and to graze. Thus far the 
change of grammatical class has been indicated by a change 
of form, and this is the usual, but not the constant process 
of derivation. There are still many instances, and in 
earlier stages of English there were many more, where a 
radical is employed in a new class, without a change of form. 
Thus the substantive man, without the alteration of a letter, 
becomes a verb, and we say to man a ship ; so from arm, to 
arm a fortress / from saddle, bit, and bridle, to saddle, bit, 
or bridle a horse ; and the Morte d' Arthur speaks of a knight 
as being well sworded and well shielded, using participial 
forms which imply the verbs to sword, and to shield* 

Composition in etymology means the forming of one word 
out of two or more, with or without change of form in either. 
In words framed by composition, each of the constituents 
may possess and still retain an independent significance, as 
for example in steam-ship, in which instance each half of the 

* In many cases of this sort the modern verb has been formed from an Anglo- 
Saxon word of tlie same etymology and grammatical class, by dropping the 
characteristic verbal ending -an; in others, it is altogether of recent origin, 
and so long as it has existed as a verb, it has been identical in form with its 
primitive noun. 

Our American to proyrhx is one of the few verbalized nouns of recent coin- 
age. It has not much to recommend it besides its novelty, but it seems likely 
to secure full recognition on both sides of the Atlantic. See further, Lecture 
XIV. 



198 COMPOSITION OF WORDS. 

word has just the same sense as when employed by itself, 
though, in order to complete the meaning of the compound, 
something must be mentally supplied, understood, as English 
grammarians say, or as the Latins more happily express it, 
sub audi trim, under heard. In this case, the defect of 
meaning is in the want of connection between the two halves 
of the word, steam and ship, and a foreigner, unacquainted 
with the rules of English composition, an Italian for instance, 
would not be able to perceive how the English meaning could 
be given to the compound by the mere juxtaposition of its 
elements, any more than by saying vapor e-legno, which 
would express nothing. So long as this word was a new one, 
every English hearer supplied the notion of the elastic force 
of steam, acting as the motive power of the ship, though now, 
both the name and the thing are so familiar, that steamship 
does not always suggest its own etymology. This mode of 
composition is more appropriately called agglutination, and 
in the language of some rude peoples it is carried so far, that 
all the members of a period maybe incorporated into one 
word, which alone expresses an entire proposition. There are, 
however, as I shall show in treating the subject of inflections, 
many highly refined and cultivated languages, where nearly 
the same thing is effected by a mere change in the form of 
an uncompounded word.* In the majority of compound 



* In speaking of polysyllabic inflectional forms as uncompounded, I do not 
mean to express dissent from the theory that weak inflections generally result 
from the coalescence of particles or pronouns with verbal roots. As, however 
the source and history of such formations is in most cases unknown, the inflec- 
tions of cultivated languages must, in practice, be regarded as having lost the 
character of compounds, and this is especially true where old and established 
inflectional endings are applied to words of recent origin or introduction. See 
Lecture XV. 



COMPOSITION OF WORDS. 197 

words in the European languages, the component parts are 
not all separately significant, but the word consists of a princi- 
pal radical, the sense of which is reversed, extended, limited, 
specificated, or otherwise qualified, by combining with it a 
particle or other determinative, not of itself expressive of a 
state, quality, or act. Of this class of compounds, we have 
few purely English examples, the Saxon inseparable parti- 
cles, and the prepositions and adverbs used as qualificatives 
in composition, having become chiefly obsolete or limited in 
their employment, and the place of the native words into 
which they entered having been supplied by French or Latin 
compounds ready-made to our hands.* 

There are languages whose vocabulary is chiefly made up 
of primitive words, and of words which by simple and ob- 
vious rules are derived from, or composed of, primitives. 
These primitives or radicals are usually monosyllables indig- 
enous to the language, and still existing in it as independent 
words. There are other tongues whose stock of words is 
of a composite character, and in a considerable degree bor- 
rowed from foreign languages, or derived from native roots 
now obsolete or so changed in form in the processes of deriva- 
tion and composition, that they are no longer readily recog- 
nized as the source of the word. Languages of the former 

* We have still some Saxon qualificatives left, and it is much to be desired 
that the use of them may be extended. Thus, we precede radical verbs, sub- 
stantives, and adjectives, by the negative or privative syllable, un-, as in the 
words to undo, unbeliever, unknown ; the inseparable particle mis-, as in mis- 
apprehend, mis-place, mis-apply, mis-call ; the adverbs of place, out, up, and 
down; as in out-side, rip-hold, down-fall ; the prefix be- as in be-dew, bestrew. In 
these last instances, the particle he- retains its original force, and it was formerly 
much more extensively used, such words as be-bled, for covered with blood, be- 
powdered for sprinkled with powder, being very common, but in most modem 
words with this prefix, it has ceased to modify the meaning of the radical ap- 
preciably. 



198 CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES. 

class freely allow the formation of new words both by deri 
vation and by composition ; those of the latter reluctantly 
admit a resort to either of these methods of enriching thtf 
vocabulary, and prefer rather to enlarge their stock by bor 
rowing from foreign tongues, than to develop and modify, by 
organic processes, the significance of their own primitives. 
Of course, here and elsewhere, I use primitive in a very re- 
stricted sense, and by no means as implying that the roots to 
which we refer European words are necessarily or even prob- 
ably aboriginal, but simply that they have no known and 
demonstrable historical descent from distant or apparently 
remotely related tongues, and therefore stand in the place of 
primitives to the vocabulary which is composed, or has 
grown out of them. 

To the former of the two classes I have mentioned, that, 
namely, where most of the words are either primitive, or de- 
rived by obvious processes from roots familiar to every native, 
belong the Greek, the German, the Icelandic, and the Anglo- 
Saxon ; to the latter, that is where the radicals of the words 
are often obsolete, or their derivation obscure, belong the 
Latin, and in a still higher degree, what are called the Ro- 
mance languages, or those derived from the Latin. English 
occupies a place between the two, but perhaps less resembles 
the former than the latter, particularly as it shares with these 
much of their incapacity of forming at will new words from' 
familiar roots. The power of derivation and composition was 
eminently characteristic of our maternal Anglo-Saxon, but 
was much diminished upon the introduction of the Norman 
French, or to speak more justly, the Latin element, which 
refused to accommodate itself to this organic faculty of the 
Saxon tongue. A comparison of the Anglo-Saxon translation 
of the Gospels with the received version, is instructive on 



ANGLO-SAXON GOSPELS. 199 

this point. The latter is distinguished for -ts freedom from 
Latin isms, and was made with constant reference to the 
Greek, and with an evident design sedulously to avoid un- 
necessary coincidences of expression with the Yulgate and 
the older translations made from it. The Anglo-Saxon ver 
si on was taken from the Itala or the Vulgate, and probably 
though this is not certain, without any opportunity of com- 
parison with translations in other languages, and yet its vo- 
cabulary is almost purely of native growth. Even the spe- 
cial words characteristic of the civil and political life of Judea, 
and of the Jewish and Christian religions, are very generally 
supplied by indigenous words, simple or compound, of cor- 
responding etymology. The standard English version adopts, 
without translation, the words prophet, scribe, sepulchre, cen- 
turion, baptize, synagogue, resurrection, disciple, parable, 
treasure, pharisee, whereas the Anglo-Saxon employs, in- 
stead, native words, often, no doubt, framed for this special 
purpose. Thus, for prophet we have wit eg a, a wise or 
knowing man; for scribe, bocere, book-man; for sepul- 
chre, byrgen, whence our words bury, and barrow in the 
sense of funeral-mound ; for centurion, hundred-man, the 
etymological equivalent of the Latin centurio; for baptize, 
f u 1 1 i a n ; for syn agogue, gesamnung, congregation ; for 
resurrection, serist, uprising; for disciple, leorning- 
c n i li t , learning-youth ; for parable, b i g s p e 1 , the G erman 
B e i s p i e 1 , example ; for treasure, g o 1 d - h o r d ; for phar- 
isee, sunder- h alga, over-holy. The word employed as 
the equivalent of repentance, or the Latin pcenitentia, is 
remarkable, because it does not involve the notion of penance, 
a ceremonial or disciplinary satisfaction, which is a character- 
istic of the Romish theology, and seems implied even in tlie 
Lutheran B u s s e thun. The Anglo-Saxon daedbote don. 



200 COMPOSITION OF WORDS. 

dssdbote, which are used for repent and repentance, con 
vey the idea of making satisfaction or compensation, not to 
the church, but to the party wronged, and therefore, if not 
proper translations of the corresponding words in the Greek 
text, they are departures from the Yulgate. I cannot but re- 
gard these facts as an argument of some weight in support of 
the theory which maintains that the primitive English church 
was substantially independent of the papal see. 

Our present power of derivation and composition is much 
restricted, and while many other living languages can change 
all nouns, substantive and adjective, into each other, or into 
verbs, and vice versa, still retaining the root-form, which 
makes the new-coined word at once understood by every na- 
tive ear, we, on the contrary, are constantly obliged to resort 
to compounds of foreign and to us unmeaning roots, when- 
ever we wish to express a complex idea by a single word. 
The German and other cognate languages still retain this 
command over their own hereditary resources, and in point 
of ready intelligibility and picturesqueness of expression, 
they have thus an important advantage over languages 
which, like the Latin and its derivatives, possess less plastic 
power. There are, in all the Gothic tongues, numerous com- 
pounds, of very obvious etymology, which are most eminently 
expressive, considered as a part of what may be called the 
nature-speech of man, as contrasted with that which is more 
appropriately the dialect of literature and art, and thus 
those languages are very rich, just where, as I remarked in a 
former lecture, our own is growing poor. The vocabulary 
belonging to the affections, the terms descriptive of the spon- 
taneous action of the intellectual and moral faculties, the pic- 
torial words which bring the material creation vividly before 
as, these in the languages in question are all more numerous, 



COMPOSITION OF WORDS. 201 

more forcible than the Latin terms by which we have too of- 
ten supplied their places. 

The facility of derivation and composition in the Greek 
and Gothic languages is almost unlimited, and a native, once 
master of the radicals, and fully possessed of the laws of for- 
mation, can at any time extemporize a word for the precise ex- 
pression of any complete idea he may choose to embody in a 
single vocable. Aristophanes has a word of fourteen syllables, 
from six radicals, signifying mean ly-rising-early-and-hurrying- 
to-the-tril)iinal-to-denounce-another-for-an-infraction-of-a-law- 
concerning-the-exportation-of-figs, so that one word expresses 
an idea, the translation of which into English occupies twen- 
ty-two. In another case, the same dramatist coins a word of 
seventy-two syllables, as the name of a dish composed of a 
great number of ingredients, and Eichter quotes Forster as 
authority for a Sanscrit compound of one hundred and fifty- 
two syllables. Yoss has framed a German equivalent for the 
first mentioned of these sesquipedalia verba,* eigh- 
teen-inch words, as Horace calls them, and the German word, 
like the Greek, is, in this and other similar cases, an example 
of agglutination rather than technical etymological composi- 
tion. In the Gothic languages, the elements of the com- 
pound are not generally very numerous, but Icelandic, An- 
glo-Saxon and German have many very forcible inseparable 
particles and modes of composition, by which a wonderful 
life and vigor is imparted to language. Thus in Icelandic 
the particle of, too much, is instinct with meaning, and 
when a man of lower rani reproved his foster-son, a Norwe- 
gian king, for indiscreetly conferring too high rank on a sub- 
ject, he administered a more pointed rebuke by the single 

* Morgeudammerungshandelmachcrrecbtsverderbmuhwauderung. 



202 INSEPARABLE PARTICLES. 

compound, o f - j a r 1 , f 6 s t r i minn! too much a jarl, my 
foster-son ! than if lie had said, as one would express the 
same thought in English, You are too liberal in bestowing 
rank ! Yon promote Sveinn above his merits ! In the 
same admirable language, a word of three syllables precisely 
equivalent in its elements, and almost in form, tc our words 
father and better, means a son who has surpassed the merits 
of his father. The Anglo-Saxon inseparable particles wan-, 
be-, and for- corresponding to the German ver-, had great 
force and beauty, and the writer who shall restore them to 
their primitive use and significance will confer a greater ben- 
efit upon our poetical dialect than he who shall naturalize a 
thousand Romance radicals.* We have a few compounds 



* It is very difficult to define the meaning of inseparable particles, because 
their force is usually more or less modified by that of the radical with which 
they are combined, and therefore their significance is best learned by the study 
of examples. Be- is sometimes an intensive of the sense of the verb to which 
it is prefixed, but it more usually and properly serves to express a peculiar re- 
lation between the radical notion conveyed by the verb and the nominative or 
objective of the verb, by which, while the nominative and objective retain their 
syntactical character of subject and object, they are logically placed in a differ- 
ent category. Thus, if I sprinkle water, the object on which the drops fall is 
besprinkled; I bestrew the ground with roses by strewing the flowers upon it; 
dry earth is powdered to dust, and the garments of a traveller are be-powdered 
with the dust. In very many Anglo-Saxon, as well as modern English verbs, 
the prefix be- has no discoverable force, and in several instances we use be- where 
the primitive word was compounded with the particle ge. Our believe, for ex- 
ample, is the Anglo-Saxon ge-lyfan, (the German glauben.) I do not know 
that the history of this change has been traced, but it took place very early, for 
gereden, a participial form, is the only word in Layamon with the prefix ge- ? 
and it occurs in the Ormulum only in gehatenn, also a participle. The pre- 
fix i-, (the Saxon participial and preterit augment ge-, possibly distinct from 
the prefix ge- used with other forms,) is met with in the Ormulum in one in- 
stance only, but in many cases in Layamon. The compound form believe does 
not occur in the Ormulum at all, lefenn and trowwenn, the modern trow, 
Deing employed instead ; but it is often used in Layamon in different verbal and 
nominal forms, as bileaf, bilef, verbs, and bilefue, bileue, noun. Fov 
^not to be confounded with /ore-, as inforeteW) seems to have corresponded 



X 



gpotrnoN ov wornm 

with the prefix for- remaining. For example,jrbrftt<2 is com- 
pounded of bid and y'v- used In the sense of opposition 01 
contrast, bo that bid, which moans to command, when com* 
pounded with for*, signifies to prohibit ; hut most of the 
words into which this particle entered arc nnfortunatelj ob- 
solete. How much betters word 18 forbkd) than taint 1'roni 

bleeding; fordo, than ruin ; fordwvned, than dwindled au ay ; 
/y/// ( //, than tired with fighting ; forjudge, than unjust- 
ly condemn ; forpined, than wasted away \forvxUohed than 
weary with watching ; forutandrtdi than tired with wander* 
bag, or in another sense, than haying Lost the waj ; for* 

chased, than weary of pursuit • foTWepty than exhausted with 

weeping ; forworn, than tired or worn out; and so, what* 
bargain we made when we exchanged those beautiful 

word-. WCUnhope, tor despair, and 100 Tit rust, tor jealoi; 

suspicion ! 

ll<>\ve\er stable in its structure English must now be con- 
sidered, 3 e1 the \\ arfare bol ween Its element.- is not absolutely 

ended, and though pe:iee has hceii proclaimed, some :l.ir 

mishing is still going on. We yel forge out questionable 
derivatives and Bolder together unlawful compounds, in col- 
loquial and especially jocular discourse, and hold author.- like 

Oarlyle will now and then venture to print s heterodox for- 
mation. Good writers were less scrupulous two hundred 

►, luit since Queen Anne's time we are heeome t00 

Be, and as the French lout, to tolerate the words 

in which our progenitors delighted. Puller concerned him- 
self little about starched verhal criticism, helped himself to 

id word wherever he could find it, and, when need was, 
Manufactured one for the purpose. Thus, in telling the 

nearly |0 tli'- Brunei I I i m .1 , ami as in fhr I t 

pooullar fora if too lubtle and rariabli to bt ftxod >\ dttaiUoo. 



204 COMPOSITION OF WORDS, 

of the elderly gentleman with two female friends, one of 
whom, near his own age, plucked out his black hairs, the 
other, more juvenile, his white ones, he says the younger un- 
grayhaired him.* This however is not worse than our now 
common triplicate compounds, horse-rail-road, steam-tow- 
boat, and the like.f 

The Icelandic and the Anglo-Saxon, though not inferior 
to the German in facility of composition, had nevertheless a 
smaller number of distinctive and derivative forms, and they 
were thus driven to use composition in some cases, where the 
Teuton expressed a similar notion by a difference of ending. 
Of these combinations, there is one common to the Scandi- 
navian and the English, which, in awkwardness, surpasses 
almost any thing to be met with in any other speech. I re- 
fer to that by which the distinction of sex is expressed, not 
by a termination or an independent adjective, but by using 
the personal pronoun as a prefix, as for example in the words 
he-hear and she-hear, he-goat and she-goat. 

The effort which German scholars have long been making 
to substitute native for foreign derivatives and compounds, 

* The privative un- was formerly much more freely used than at present. 
Hey wood has unput, and Fuller in his sermon, Comfort in Calamity, says, "God 
permitteth the foundations to be destroyed, because he knows he can «m-destroy 
them, I mean rebuild them." Sylvester, the translater of the "Divine" Du 
Bartas, the delight of Shakespeare's contemporaries, uses to un-olde for to re- 
h.venate ; 

Minde-gladding fruit that can un-olde a man. 

Du Bartas, e'-tion of 1611, p. 608. 

f Clumsy as are some of these compounds, the French are sometimes driven 
to employ combinations even more unwieldly. Chinese-sugar-cane may be en- 
dured, but canne- a- sue re -de- la -Chine can only be paralleled by our 
mongrel pocket-hand-ker-chief. 

Sylvester is remarkable for the boldness of his agglutinations. In his series 
>f sonnets, "The Miracle of Peace," we find "the In-one-Christ-baptized," "the 
selfe-weale-wounding Lance," " th' yerst-most-prince-loyal people," and others 
not less extraordinary. 



COMPOSITION OF WORDS. 205 

has occasioned the fabrication of many extremely clumsy 
words, and the newly awakened zeal for the study of Anglo- 
Saxon and Old-English will probably lead to somewhat 
similar results in our tongue. The principles of composi- 
tion may then be considered to have a prospective, if not an 
immediate, practical bearing on English etymology, and 1 
will illustrate some of them by examples drawn from the 
German, which exhibit their actual application in more tan- 
gible and intelligible shapes than the present scientific dia- 
lect of English presents. Take, for instance, the idea of 
fluidity. The Anglo-Saxon and the Old-German had no sub- 
stantive to express this notion, the condition of being fluid, 
but they used the specific words water, oil, and the like, in- 
stead of framing a generic term to express them all. Science 
has taught that, besides the gross, heavy, visible, incompres- 
sible fluids, water and oil, there are other more ethereal sub- 
stances, possessing the quality of fluidity, that is of flowing 
and spreading indefinitely when only partially confined, and 
which are, besides, light and highly compressible, elastic, and, 
usually, invisible and apparently inadhesive. Of such fluids, 
common air, and the more recently detected gases, are famil- 
iar examples. Before the essential character of the gases was 
understood, English had borrowed the word fluidity from 
the Latin, to denote the most obvious and striking character- 
istic of water, oil, and other like bodies, and the Germans 
had formed from the native verb fliessen, to flow, a cor- 
responding substantive, Flussigkeit, which is applied both 
to the property of fluidity and to bodies which possess it. 
The knowledge of the character of gaseous fluids rendered it 
desirable to contrive some means of grouping under separate 
denominations the two classes, namely, the incompressible, 
unelastic, visible, and the compressible, elastic, and invisible 



206 SCIENTIFIC COMPOUNDS. 

fluids. Ill English, we have not yet distinguished them, ex 
cept by adding the epithets elastic, gaseous, compressible, or 
inelastic, incompressible ; but in Germany compound adjec- 
tives have been framed, which, clothed in an English form, 
would answer to elastic-fluid substances and droppable-fluid 
substances, or, those which left free expand themselves like 
air, and those which can be dropped or poured out, like wa- 
ter. In English we confine the appellation liquid to these 
latter, but we apply fluid indiscriminately to both. Thus we 
call oil and water liquids, but we cannot speak of air and the 
simple gases as liquids, though in poetry the phrase liquid 
ether and the like are used ; but on the other hand, we apply 
the substantive and adjective fluid to air, water, and oil alike. 
Doubtless the period is not far distant when the elastic and 
the inelastic fluids will be distinguished by appropriate des- 
ignations in English, though it may be hoped less cumbrous 
ones than the German, and we shall also probably have spe- 
cific generalizations for the watery and the oleaginous fluids. 
However desirable it may be to recover the ancient plas- 
ticity of the Anglo-Saxon speech, and to restore to circulation 
many of its obsolete most expressive words, yet the preva- 
lence, among English scholars, of a purism as exclusive as 
that of Germany, would be a serious injury to the language, 
as indeed I think it is in German itself, though of course a 
far less evil in a harmonious and unmixed speech like the 
German, than in one fundamentally composite, and to use a 
legal term, repugnant, like ours. German is singularly ho- 
mogeneous and consistent in its vocabulary and its structure, 
and the desire to strengthen and maintain its oneness of char- 
acter is extremely natural with those to whom it is vernacu- 
lar. The essential unity of its speech gives its study im- 
mense value as both a philological and an intellectual disci* 



UNITY OF GERMAN. 207 

pline, and it has powerfully contributed to the eminently 
national and original character of a literature, which, for a 
century, has done more to widen the sphere of human knowl- 
edge, and elevate the habitual range of human thought, than 
the learning and the intellect of all the world besides. I 
think, nevertheless, that it has purchased its present linguistic 
purity at some cost of clearness and precision of expression, 
perhaps even at some loss of distinctness of thought. 

Although it must be admitted, that facility of word-coin- 
age is in many respects a great linguistic convenience, it is 
quite another question whether, in philosophical exactness of 
meaning, any thing is gained by using words derived from 
or compounded of roots so familiar that they continually force 
upon us their often trivial etymology, and thus withdraw our 
attention from the figurative or abstract meaning which we 
seek to impose upon them. 

We express most moral affections, most intellectual func- 
tions and attributes, most critical categories and most scien- 
tific notions, by words derived from Greek and Latin primi- 
tives. Such words do not carry their own definition with 
them, and to the mere English student they are purely arbi- 
trary in their signification.* The scientific writer who intro- 
duces or employs them, may so define his terms as to attach 
to them the precise idea he wishes to convey, and the reader 
or hearer receives the word unaccompanied by any incon- 
gruous image suggested by its root-form. "Where, on the 
contrary, words applied to so noble uses are derived from 
common and often vulgar roots, from the vocabulary of the 
market, the kitchen or the stable, the thoughts of the reader 
must be frequently disturbed by gross or undignified images, 

* See Lecture IV. 



208 SCIENTIFIC COMPOUNDS. 

called forth b y an etymology drawn from the names of famil- 
iar and humble objects and processes. Take, for instance, 
the geographical meaning of the Latin-English words, longi- 
tude and latitude. The ancients supposed the torrid and the 
frigid zones to be uninhabitable and even impenetrable by 
man, but while the earth, as known to them, was bounded 
westwardly by the Atlantic Ocean, it extended indefinitely 
towards the east. The dimensions of the habitable world, 
then, (and ancient geography embraced only the home of 
man, r/ occovfievr],) were much greater, measured from west 
to east, than from south to north. Accordingly, early geog- 
raphers called the greater dimension, or the east and west 
line, the length, longitudo, of the earth, the shorter di- 
mension, or the north and south line, they denominated its 
breadth, latitudo. These Latin terms are retained in the 
modern geography of most European nations, but with a 
modified meaning. The north or south distance of any 
point on the earth's surface from the equator is the north or 
south latitude of that point. The east or west distance be- 
tween two lines drawn perpendicularly to the equator, through 
two points on the earth's surface, is the east or west longi- 
tude of those points from each other. Latitude and longitude 
etymologically indeed mean breadth and length, yet in their 
use in English, their form does not suggest to the student 
their primary radical signification, and he attaches to them 
no meaning whatever but their true scientific import. The 
employment of the English terms breadth and length, to de- 
note respectively north and south and east and west distance 
on tne surface of a sphere, would, in the present advanced 
state of our knowledge, be a perversion of the true meaning 
of words. Yet this is exactly what German purism does 
when it rejects the precise, philosophic longitude and lati* 



GERMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 209 

tude, substitutes for them the vague and inaccurate terms 
Lange and Breite, length and breadth, and says, accord- 
ingly, that St. Petersburg lies in sixty degrees of north breadth, 
and twenty-eight of east length from Paris. Still more pal- 
pable is this abuse of speech when a different form of ex- 
pression is employed, and we are told that the breadth of the 
city of New York is 41°, its length T±° W.* 

In like manner, the English adjective great and the Ger- 
man gross arc both, in their proper signification, appli- 
cable only to objects which, as tested by the ordinary stan- 
dards of comparison, are large, and their nouns, greatness in 
the one language, Grosse in the other, are strictly conjugate 
in meaning. In the philosophic dialect of English and the 
Romance languages, we employ magnitude as the scientific 
equivalent of size, dimensions. Magnitude is derived from 
Latin ma gnus, great, but that etymology is not so 
familiar to English ears as to attach to the word magnitude 
the idea of relatively large bulk, and we apply the term, 
without a sense of incongruity, to the dimensions of any ob- 
ject however small. The Germans use Grosse as the 
scientific equivalent of magnitude, and in this they pervert 
language in the same way we should do, in speaking of the 
greltnm of microscopic animalcule so small that a hundred 
of them could lie on the point of a pin. 

So in chemistry and in the language of industrial art, to 
calcine signifies to reduce, by longer or shorter exposure to 

* I do not know whether the Germans or the Dutch were the first to trans- 
late longitude and latitude by native words of their respective tongues. The 
•Briieet exampleB I have noted of the use .of modern equivalent* of these words 
are in Dapper, Beschrijving van Tersie, 1672. De stadt Derbend is gelegen op 
delengtevan vijf en tachtig graden, en op de noorder breete van een en 
rcertigh graden, dertigh minuten.— p. 20. 
H 



210 GERMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE.. 

heat, metals and other bodies popularly considered incombus- 
tible, to a friable condition. The burning of lime is a familiar 
instance of calcination, and in fact calcine is derived from 
calx, the Latin word for lime. Burnt limestone, and the 
substances to which metals and many other bodies are re- 
duced by heat, having a certain resemblance to each other in 
consistence and other properties, were conceived to be chem- 
ically related, and therefore the name of calx was applied 
to these substances in the dialect of the alchemists, and passed 
from their laboratories into the language of common life. 
The English verb calcine, to us, to whom the etymology of the 
word is not always present, expresses precisely the reduction 
of incombustible substances to the state of a calx. The 
modern German uses, instead of the alchemical calcini- 
ren, the verb verkalken derived from Kalk, lime, 
which is no doubt allied to the Latin calx, and probably 
enough derived from it. But Kalk has not the significa- 
tion of calx, and the verb verkalken, therefore, properly 
means to reduce to lime, not to bring to the condition of a 
calx, which latter acceptation the scientific purists have arbi- 
trarily, and in violation of the principles of their own lan- 
guage, imposed upon it. 

We have some, but, happily, not many similar examples 
in the received scientific dialect of English. Our substan- 
tive acid, for instance, is Latin, but for want of a native 
term, we employ it as a conjugate noun to the adjective sour, 
and it has become almost as familiar a word as sour itself. 
Chemistry adopted acid as the technical name of a class of 
bodies, of which those first recognized in science were distin- 
guished by sourness of taste. But as chemical knowledge 
advanced, it was discovered that there were compounds pre- 



GERMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 211 

cisely analogous in essential character, which were not sour ; 
and consequently acidify was but an accidental quality of 
some of these bodies, not a necessary or universal charac- 
teristic of all. It was thought too late to change the name, 
and accordingly in all the European languages the term acid, 
or its etymological equivalent, is now applied to rock-crys- 
tal, quartz, and flint. In like manner, from a similar mis- 
application of salt, in scientific use, chemists class the sub 
stance of which junk-bottles, French mirrors, windows and 
opera-glasses are made, among the salts, while, on the other 
hand, analysts have declared that the essential character, not 
only of other so called salts, but of common kitchen-salt, the 
6alt of salts, had been mistaken, that salt is not a salt, and 
accordingly have excluded that substance from the class of 
bodies upon which, as their truest representative, it had be- 
stowed its name.* The attempt to press into the service of 
the exact sciences words taken from the vocabulary of common 
life is thus seen to be objectionable, because such words are 
incapable of scientific precision and singleness of meaning, 
and, moreover, as in the instances cited, they often express 
entirely false notions of physical fact. 

With respect to compounds of trivial roots, it must be 
admitted that they are advantageously employed as the 
i Klines of familiar material or immaterial objects and proc 



* Es ist hentzutage nicht mehr moglich einc Definizion einer "Saure" odor 
eines " Salzes" zn gcbcn, welche alle Korper, die man als Siiuren oder Salze 
beseichnet, in sieh einschliesat. Wir haben S&nren welche geschmackles Bind, 
welche die Pflanzenfarben nicht rdthen, wclche die Alkalien nicht neutralisiren ; 
es gibt Sauren, in denen Saucretoff ein Bestandtheil jstund in denen der Was 
eerstoff fehlt, in anderen ist WasserstofF, koin Baueretoff Der BegriEM 
ist zulctzt so vorkehrt geworden, dass man dihinkam das KLochsalz, daa Ball 
aller Salze, von dem die andern den Nainen haben, ana der Reihe der eigentl* 
ehen Salze auszuschlics3en. Liebig, Cheinische Briefe, Vierte Auflage, I., %. 



212 GERMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 

of a somewhat complex but not abstruse nature. Thus stuirnr 
boat is a better word than the Greco-French, pyroscaphe, 
the German Yorgefuhl than presentiment. So English 
physicians would have done more wisely in adopting the 
plain descriptive compounds, day-blindness and night-blindr 
ness, which, as appellations of certain affections of the sight, 
explain themselves, than to borrow the Greek nyctalo 
p i a , which has been applied by some writers to one of these 
maladies, by others to its converse, and which, as we learn from 
Isidore, the grandson of the great King Theodoric, was just 
as equivocal twelve hundred and fifty years ago as it is to-day. 
But in the use of these words in the dialect of science, in 
their application to abstract or obscure philosophical con- 
ceptions, the inappropriateness of a nomenclature derived from 
familiar roots is often very obvious. Our English word anat* 
omy, which, referred to its Greek original, means simply cut- 
ting up, has come to have the signification of carefully dis- 
secting, separating, or laying open by the knife, the frame- 
work, tissues and vessels of animal bodies with a view of 
studying the structure and functions of their organs ; and all 
this is fairly implied and felt by every speaker or hearer, 
whenever the word is uttered, nor does it suggest to the mind 
any other possible signification, or call up any alien image. 
Many German writers have chosen to repudiate this so ex- 
pressive, definite, and strictly philosophic word, and to sub- 
stitute for it the compound Z ergliederungskunst, 
which, dressed in an English form, would be equivalent to 
the Art-qf -dismembering, or more exactly, the Unlimbing- 
art. ISTow this unwieldy compound rather expresses the act oi 
dissecting, the mechanical part of anatomy and some there- 
fore have thought it necessary to employ another word, 



GERMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 213 

Zergliederungswissenschaft, the knowledge or sci- 
ence of unlimbing, to indicate the scientific purpose and 
character of anatomy, which is so happily implied in what to 
us is a purely arbitrary word. 

Whenever a derivative or compound term may, without 
violence, have several meanings, it is a matter of considera- 
ble difficulty for those to whom all these meanings are, so to 
speak, instinctively familiar, to confine their intellectual con- 
ceptions strictly to one, but, to the English student, anatomy 
is practically not a compound. He does not refer it to its 
etymological source, and to him it can mean nothing but 
scientific dissection ; nor can the word suggest any image not 
appropriately belonging to that idea. 

In the nomenclature of Chemistry, to designate the bod- 
ies, which, because analysis is not yet carried beyond them, 
are provisionally denominated simple substances, Ave employ 
Greek compounds, giving to them, by formal definition, and 
therefore arbitrarily, a precise, distinct, rigorously scientific 
meaning, excluding all other direct or collateral, proper or 
figurative, significations. In the German chemical nomen- 
clature, these bodies are designated by Teutonic compounds 
derived from roots as trivial as any in the language. The 
words carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, employed in Eng- 
lish, do not recall their etymology, and their meaning is gath- 
ered only from technical definition. They express the entire 
scientific notion of the objects they stand for, and arc abridged 
definitions, or rather signs of definition, of those objects. 
They are to the English student as purely intellectual sym- 
bols as the signs of addition, subtraction, and equality in Al 
gebra, or, to use a more appropriate simile, as their initials 
h>r carbon, II for hydrogen, O for oxygen, and the like, 



214 GERMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 

which, in conjunction with numerals, are used in expressing 
quantitative proportions in primary combinations. The cor- 
responding German compounds, Kohl- S toff, Wasser- 
Stoff, Sauer-Stoff, and S tick- S toff, coal-stuff, war 
ter-stuff) sour-stuff and choke-stuff, express, each, only a 
single one of the characteristics of the body to which they 
are applied, to say nothing of the unphilosophical tendency 
of thus grossly materializing and vulgarizing our conception 
of agencies so subtile and so ethereal in their nature.* 



* The use of the new German technical terms is subject to this further incon- 
venience, that the compound will not admit the adjectival form, and of course 
the noun is without a conjugate attributive. AVhile, therefore, a German may 
say, in pure Teutonic, for anatomy, the Art-of-dismembering ; for astronomy, 
Star-knowledge ; for geography, Earth-knowledge and Earth-description, (either 
of which by the w r ay may as properly apply to soil or rock as to the globe,) 
yet when he has occasion for a corresponding adjective, he must resort to the 
Greek compounds anatomisch, astronomisch, geogra phisch , and 
thus he introduces confusion into his scientific dialect, and loses whatever had 
been gained by the introduction of native compound nouns. So, in expressing 
the quantitative proportions determined by ultimate analysis in chemistry, he 
uses H and 0, the initials of hydrogen and oxygen, to represent those bodies, 
and the student of chemistry is taught that H stands for Wasserstoff, for 
S au e r s t o ff , and so of the rest. 

The puristico-descriptive nomenclature seems to have reached its acme in 
Volger's vocabulary of Crystallography. (Krystallographie, Stuttgart, 1854.) 
In another of his works, this author describes a form of Boracite, a solid of 
sixty-two sides, as the linkstimplig-hockertimplige, wiirflig-kugel- 
timplige, rechts-timplige Knochling, and another variety of the 
same crystal as the linkstimplig-hockertiinplig-knochlige, rechts- 
ku geltimplige, wiirflige (rechte) Timpling, the meaning of which 
would not be altogether obvious even to his countrymen, had he not informed 
us that in the Niederdeutsche Mundart, Tim pel signifies Zipfel, or scharfe 
Ecke. Yolger, Monographic des Borazites, p. 120. 

Kenngott (Synonymik der Krystallographie XXXV.) gives us this example 
of the application of Volger's nomenclature to a still more complicated form of 
crystallization; "Einplattliger, querstutzlig-stutzliger, querhocb- 
dachliger, quermitteldachliger, querhochthurmliger, juerraiu 
telthiirmliger, querniederthurmliger, schlankzinkliger, nieder- 
zinkliger, quaderligzweifachquerkantliger Idokras-Querling," 
wid even this string of hard words leaves the form of the mineral but half de- 



GERMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 215 

It is no answer to the objections I am urging to say that 
habit reconciles ns to the scientific use of unscientific terms ; 
that they at length, when employed in combination with 
other words of art, sink their etymology, so to speak, and 
cease to suggest disturbing images ; for just in the same pro- 
portion as they do this they cease to be descriptive at all, and 
the only argument left for their use is that of a form more 
in harmony with the ordinary orthoepical combinations of 
the language, an argument certainly not to be weighed against 
the obvious disadvantages of a vocabulary, which is not only 
trivial, but which scientific discovery is constantly showing 
to have been founded on false analogies, and erroneous 
theory. 

There is, it must be admitted, a convenience in the dou- 
ble forms of some part of the German neologistic nomen- 
clature, as for example in the distinction between Erd- 



Bcribed. In justice to our author, it ought to be observed that, long as hifl 
technical words are, they are much shorter than some of those employed by 
Others. Thus Schiibling, shoveling, is a trifle compared to pentagontriakiste* 
tetraeder, and K e i 1 i n g , wcdgeling, has the like advantage over quadratic- sphenoid' 
in-nonnal -position. 

Besides these, Voider uses Schragling, slantling, Thttr ruling, ton-erling, 
Diichling, roofing, Eckling, cornerlivg, and many more of like coinage, by 
all which 

More is meant than meets the ear. 

It is to be regretted that our author does not consistently adhere to the princi« 
pies of a system which he has taken such pains to elaborate, and it is not easy 
to see why he should speak of II a 1 u r g e n and die h a 1 u r g i s c h e G e o 1 o g i e , 
when he had so good etymological material as Salz to work upon. 

The philosophers of Holland have exhibited a greater degree of etymological 
courage than their German brethren. They have framed conjugate adject iveH 
for their newly formed scientific compound nouns, and thus built up such words 
as on tleedku n d ig for anatomical, d e proefo nder vi ndelij k e wet cli- 
nch appen for the experimental sciences, in which last heptasyllable, indeed, the 
radical word proef is probably not indigenous, but borrowed from the Latin 
through the French. See Apj endix, 36. 



21(3 EQUIVOCAL WORDS. 

kunde, the knowledge of the earth, and Erdbeschrei 
bung, the description of the earth. These ideas are indeed 
logically distinguishable, because, we may know that which 
we do not undertake to describe, and we mav undertake to 
describe that which we know, or, as experience unhappily 
too often shows, that which we do not know ; but it is by no 
means clear that there is any advantage in having a separate 
word for the expression of every distinguishable shade of hu- 
man thought. True it is, as is observed by Coleridge, that 
" by familiarizing the mind to equivocal expressions, that is, 
such as may be taken in two or more different meanings, we 
introduce confusion of thought, and furnish the sophist with 
his best aud handiest tools. For the juggle of sophistry 
consists, for the greater part, in using a word in one sense in 
the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion." But it 
is equally true, as the same great master elsewhere remarks, 
that u It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order 
to distinguish." The ramifications and subdivisions of our 
vocabulary must end somewhere. The permutations and 
combinations of articulate sounds are not infinite, nor can 
the human memory retain an unlimited number of words. 
It is inevitable that in some cases one word must serve to ex- 
press different ideas, and if they be ideas, from the occa- 
sional confusion of which, no danger to any great moral or 
intellectual principle is to be feared, we must be content to 
trust to the intelligence of our hearers to distinguish for them- 
selves. There is much intellectual discipline in the mere use 
of language. The easiest disciplines are not necessarily the 
best, and therefore a vocabulary so complete as never to ex- 
ercise the sagacity of a reader, by obliging him to choose 
between two meanings, either of which is possible, would 



EQUIVOCAL WORDS. 217 

afford very little training to faculties, of whose culture speech 
is of itself the most powerful instrument.* 

* Few will deny that the French chemical nomenclature of Lavoisier's time, 
which spread so rapidly over Europe, was a highly beneficial improvement iu 
the vocabulary of the branch of knowledge to which it was applied, but it 
operated in some respects both injuriously to that science and unjustly to the 
fame of the philosophers whose discoveries had made chemistry what it was. 
It produced a complete severance between the old and the new, a hiatus in the 
history, and an apparent revolution in the character, of the science, which has 
led recent times to suppose that futile alchemy ended, and philosophical chem- 
istry began, with the adoption of the new nomenclature. The reader will find 
some interesting observations on this point in Liebig's Chemische Brief'e, 4te., 
Auflage, Brief III. 



LECTURE X. 

THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

III. 

The aphorism, popularly, but perhaps erroneously, ascribed 
to BufTon, " The style is the man," is a limited application of 
the general theory, that there is such a relation between the 
mind of man and the speech he uses, that a perfect knowl- 
edge of either would enable an acute psychological philolo- 
gist to deduce and construct the other from it. The distinc- 
tive characteristics of nations or races employing different 
tongues, so far as we are able to account for them, are due to 
causes external to the individual, though common in their 
operation to the whole people, such as climate, natural pro- 
ductions, modes of life dependent on soil and climate, oiy 
in short, physical conditions. 

We might then admit this theory, without qualification, 
it it were once established that the language of a people is 
altogether a natural product of their physical constitution 
and circumstances, and that its character depends upon laws 
as material as those which determine the hue and growth of 
the hair, the color of the eyes and skin, the musical quality 
of the human voice, or the inarticulate cries of the lower an- 



LANGUAGE AND CHARACTER. 219 

imals. But those who believe that there is in man a life 
above organization, a spirit above nature, will be slow to 
allow that his only instrument for the outward manifestation 
of his mightiest intellectual energies and loftiest moral aspi- 
rations, as well as his sole means of systematic culture for 
the intellect and heart, can be the product of a mode of 
physical being, which, though in some points superior in 
degree, is yet identical in kind, with that shared also by the 
lowest of the brutes that acknowledge him as their lord and 
master. Isor is the theory in question at all consistent with 
observed facts ; for while nations, not distinguished by any 
marked differences of physical structure or external condi- 
tion, use languages characterized by wide diversities of vo- 
cabulary and syntax, individuals in the same nation, the 
same household, even, display striking dissimilarities of per- 
son, of intellect, and of temper, and yet, in spite of percep- 
tible variations in articulation, and in the choice and colloca- 
tion of words, speak in the main not only one language, but 
one dialect, History presents numerous instances of a com- 
plete revolution in national character, without any radical 
change in the language of the people, and, contrariwise, of 
persistence of character with a great change in tongue. The 
forms of speech, which the slavish, and therefore deservedly 
enslaved, Roman of the first century of our era employed in 
addressing Tiberius, were as simple and direct as those of a 
soldier would have been in conversing with his centurion in 
the heroic age of Regulus. The Icelander of the twelfth cen- 
tury carried the law of blood for blood as far as the Corsican 
cr the Ivabyle of the nineteenth, and when his honor was 
piqued, or his passions roused, he was as sanguinary in his 
temper as the Spaniard, the Anizeh-Arab, or the Ashantee. 
His descendants, speaking very nearly the same dialect, are 6« 



220 LANGUAGE AND CHARACTER. 

much softened in character, that violence is almost unkL :wn 
among them, and when, a few years since, a native was con- 
demned to death, not one of his countrymen could be induced 
to act as the minister of avenging justice. On the other 
hand, it would be difficult to make out any difference of 
character, habits, or even ethical system, between the Bedouin 
of the present day and his ancestors in the time of Abraham 
and of Job, and yet his language has unquestionably under 
gone many great changes. 

The relations between man and his speech are not capable 
of precise formulation, and we cannot perhaps make any 
nearer approach to exact truth than to say, that while every 
people has its general analogies, every individual has his pe- 
culiar idiosyncrasies, physical, mental and linguistic, and 
that mind and speech, national and individual, modify and 
are modified by each other, to an extent, and by the operation 
of laws, which we are not yet able to define, though, in par- 
ticular instances, the relation of cause and effect can be con- 
fidently affirmed to exist. 

But in the midst of this uncertainty, we still recognize 
the working of the great principle of diversity in unity, which 
characterizes all the operations of the creative mind, and 
though every man has a dialect of his own, as he has his own 
special features of character, his distinct peculiarities of 
shape, gait, tone, and gesture, in short, the individualities 
which make him John and not Peter, yet over and above all 
these, he shares in the general traits which together make up 
the unity of his language, the unity of his nation. " Unity 
of speech," says a Danish writer, " is a necessary condition 
of the independent development of a people, and the coex- 
istence of two languages in a political state is one of the- 
greatest national misfortunes. Every race has its own or 



991 
CHITT OF NATIONAL LANGUAGE. 

*anic growth, which impresses its own pcchiar form on the 
52 rideas and the philosophical opinions of the people, 
on Their political constitntion, their legislation, the, custom, 
,„d the expression of all these individualities as found m the 
1 Z this are emhalmed that to which they have as 
P : cd) that to which they have attained. There ^e find * 
record of their thought, its comprehension, wealth and depth 
be life of the people, the limits of their culture, then- ag- 
encies and their antipathies, whatsoever has ge,— d 
fructified, ripened and passed away among them, yes, even 
11 -timings and their trespasses. The people and 
language are so con-natural, that the one thrive* 
Snges, periLswith the other." So far our author, and 
ithVe allowances to he made for the exaggeration u£ 
w bich writers are often led by their enthusiasm for the* 
subiect, his views are entitled to general concurrence. We 
i k by words, and therefore thought and words cannot but 
act and react on each other. As a man speaks, so he flunks, 
and as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. 

It is evident, therefore, that unity of speech as essential to 
the unity of a people. Community of language is a stronger 
bond than identity of religion or of government, and con- 
temporaneous nations of one speech, however formally sepa- 
rated by differences of creed or of political organization, are 
MBentii L one in culture, one in tendency, one in influence. 
The fine patriotic effusion of Arndt, "Was ist des Deutsehen 
Vaterland," was founded upon the idea that the oneness of the 
Deutsche Zunge, the German speech, implied a oneness of 
spirit, of interest, of aims and of duties, and the universal 
acceptance with which the song was received was evidence 
that the poet had struck a chord to which every Teutonic 
' heart responded. The national language is the key to t M 



222 LANGUAGE AND CHARACTER. 

national intellect, tlie national heart, and it is the special vo- 
cation of what is technically called philology, as distinguished 
from linguistics, to avail itself of the study of language as a 
means of knowing, not man in the abstract, but man as col- 
lected into distinct communities, informed with the same spirit, 
exposed to the same moulding influences, and pursuing the 
same great objects by substantially the same means. We 
are certainly not authorized to conclude that all the individ 
uals of a nation are altogether alike because they speak the 
same mother-tongue, but their characters presumably resem- 
ble each other as nearly as the fragments of the common 
language which each has appropriated to his own use. 
Every individual selects from the general stock his own vo- 
cabulary, his favorite combinations of words, his own forms 
of syntax, and thus frames for himself a dialect, the outward 
expression of which is an index to the inner life of the man. 
No two Englishmen, Germans or Frenchmen speak and act 
in all points alike, yet in character as well as in speech, they 
would generally be found to have more points of sympathy 
and resemblance with each other, than either of them with 
any man of a different tongue. 

The relations between the grammatical structure or general 
idiom of a language and the moral and intellectual charac- 
ter of those who speak it, are usually much more uncertain 
and obscure than the connection between the particular 
words, which compose their stock, and the thoughts, habits 
and tendencies of those who employ them. Except under 
circumstances where our mouths are sealed and our thoughts 
suppressed, from motives of prudence, of delicacy or of 
shame, the names of the objects dearest to the heart, the ex- 
pression of the passions which most absorb us, the nomencla- 
ture of the religious, social or political creeds or parties to 



LANGUAGE ANT) CHARACTER. 223 

which we have attached ourselves, will most frequently rise 
to the lips. Hence it is the vocabulary and the phraseological 
combinations of the man, or class of men, which must serve 
as the clue to guide us into the secret recesses of their being; 
and in spite of occasional exceptions, apparent or real, it is 
generally true that our choice of words, as also of the special 
or conventional meanings of words, is determined by the 
character, the ruling passion, the habitual thoughts, — by the 
life, in short, of the man ; and in this sense Ben Jonson ut- 
tered a great and important truth when he said : " Language 
most shows a man : speak that I may see thee ! It springs 
out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the im- 
age of the parent of it, the mind. Xo glass renders a man's 
form and likeness so true as his speech." 

But there is much risk of error in the too extended appli- 
cation of this criterion. In two cases only can we be justified 
in condemning a people upon the strength of indications fur- 
nished by their language alone. The one is that of the vol- 
untary, or at least the free, selection of a debased or perverted 
diction, when a higher and purer one is possible ; the other, 
that of the non-existence of words expressive of great ideas, 
and this will generally be found coupled with an abundance 
in terms denoting, and yet not stigmatizing, gross and wicked 
acts and passions. 

There are cases where the crimes of rulers are mirrored 
in the speech of their subjects ;* others, where governments by 
a long course of corruption, oppression, and tyranny, have 
stamped upon the language of their people, or at least upon 

* "Tis you that say it, riot I. You do the deeds, 
And your ungodly deeds find me the words. 

Sophocles, as translated bv Milton 



221- LANGUAGE OF ITALY. 

its temporary conventionalities, a tone of hypocrisy, false- 
hood, baseness, that clings to the tongue, even after the spirit 
of the nation is emancipated, and it is prepared to vindicate, 
by deeds of heroism, the rights, the principles, the dignity 
of its manhood. 

I think the language of Italy is a case in point. Landof 
argues the profound and hopeless depravity of the Italians 
from the abject character of their complimentary and social 
dialect, and the phraseology expressive of their relations'with 
their rulers or other superiors, as well as from the pompous 
style by which they magnify the importance of things in 
themselves insignificant, and their constant use of superla- 
tives and intensives, with reference to trifling objects and 
occasions. Were it true, that the Lombards, the Piedmon- 
tese, the Tuscans and the Romans of the present day had 
not inherited, but freely adopted, the dialect, of which Lan- 
dor gives a sort of anthology, it would argue much in favor 
of his theory.* A bold and manly and generous and truth- 

* The Imaginary Conversations of Landor are a very indifferent authority upon 
questions of fact, whatever opinions may be entertained concerning them as stand- 
ards in criticism, in language, or in morals. But a physiognomist may refer 
to a caricature for an illustration of the connection between moral traits and 
the physical features by which they are indicated, and I may, with at least equal 
propriety, cite the exaggerations of Landor as exemplifying the manner in which 
external causes may corrupt language, and, through it, the morality of those 
who use it. 

The metamorphosis of the frank, straightforward speech of ancient Rome 
into the cringing ft<mi which it has in modern times adopted, is the natural con 
(sequence of centuries of tyrannies, that have crushed not so much the bodies, 
as the souls of men who have so long groaned hopelessly under them. But 
whatever may have been the character of the Italians, when Landor wrote the 
dialogue from which I have taken these examples, he would grossly misjudge 
their countrymen of this generation, who should infer that because the language 
has not yet recovered its native majesty, the people is not ripe for an enno- 
bling revolution. The habitual speech of the Italians is, at present, by no 
means of so unmanly a character as the author in question represents it, and 



LANGUAGE OF ITALY. 223 



ful people certainly would not choose to say nmiliaro 
una sup plica, to humiliate a supplication, for, to present 
a memorial ; to style the strength which awes, and the finesse 
which deceives, alike, ones t a, honesty or respectability; 
to speak of taking human life by poison, not as a crime, but 
simply as a mode of facilitating death, ajutare la morte 
to employ pellegrino, foreign, for admirable; to apply 
to a small garden and a cottage the title of un pod ere, a 
power ; to call every house with a large door, un palazzo, 
a palace; a brass ear-ring, una gioja, a joy ; a present 
of a bodkin, un regal o, a royal munificence; an altera- 
tion in a picture, un pentimento , a repentance; a man 
of honor, unuomodigarbo,a well-dressed man; a 
lamb's fry, una cos a s tup en da, a stupendous thing; or 
a message sent by a footman to his tailor, through a scullion, 
una ambasciata, an embassy. 

We must distinguish between cases where words expres- 
sive of great ideas, mighty truths, do not at all exist in a 
language, and those where, as in Italy, the pressure of exter- 
nal or accidental circumstances has compelled the disuse or 

even when expressions, which jar with the self-respect of a citizen of a free 
. ate are employed, they are not nsnally accompanied with a fawning or dc- 
'radio- v deferential manner, or an ostentations sacrifice of the rights of pnva.e 
optnion and private interest. The leaven of French democracy, winch, howe e 
Tspa ng in its career of overthrow at home, was a beneficent influence » he 
nXn peninsula, is still at work; the last quarter of a century has brought he 
triples of civi and religious liberty within the intelligence, and commended 
C to the heart, of the masses ; occasion oniy has long been w.ntmg , the re- 
ce„?outrn,e perpetrated by the Papal government on the sanctums of dome*. 
Ufe in the kidnapping of a Jewish child, will, it is to be hoped, hasten the dawn 
of Ae dtw - the whole Ausonian people shall he transformed, transhgurod we 
Ivsav 'into what Milton deseribe. as", noble and P«»;-;»'S 
Terse hke a strong man after sleep and shaking her invmclble locks Thou 
^.iU reassert their claim to the divine right, of humanity, and then then 
F ",.;,h. like themselves, will burst its fetters and become onec more as grand 
and as heroic as it is beautiful. 



15 



ETHICAL CHARACTER OF WORDS. 

misapplication of such, and the habitual employment of the 
baser part of the national vocabulary. "Where grand words 
are found in a speech, there grand thoughts, noble purposes, 
high resolves exist also, or, at the least, the spark slumbers, 
which a favoring breath may kindle into a cherishing or a 
devouring flame. 

Every individual is, in a sense, a natural product of the 
people to whom he belongs, and the brave and good, who 
have so long pined in the dungeons of Naples and of Rome, 
are a sufficient proof that the oppression which has lopped 
the flower, has failed to extirpate the root, of Italian virtue. 

For the purposes of intellectual, moral, and especially 
religious culture, a speech must possess appropriate words for 
the expression of all mental, ethical and spiritual states and 
processes, and where such a nomenclature is totally wanting, 
there is no depth of depravity which we are not authorized 
to infer from so deplorable a deficiency of the means of ap- 
prehension, reflection and instruction, concerning the cardi- 
nal interests, and highest powers and perceptions of human- 
ity. It is in the non-existence of words of this class, that 
missionaries, and other teachers of Christianity and civiliza- 
tion, have found the most formidable obstacles to the propa- 
gation of intellectual and religious light and truth among the 
heathen. Even the Greek, with all its wealth of words, had, 
as Wesley long ago observed, no term for the Christian vir- 
tue of humility ) until the Apostle to the Gentiles framed one 
for it, and for this the moral poverty of the classic speech 
compelled him to resort to a root conveying the idea, not of 
self-abasement in the consciousness of utter unworthiness in 
the sight of a pure and holy God, but of positive debase- 
ment, meanness, and miserableness of spirit. 



ETHICAL CHARACTER OF WORDS 227 

Let us suppose a people cursed with a speech which had 
no terms corresponding to the ideas of holiness, faith, venera- 
tion, conscience, truth, justice, dignity, love, mercy, benevo- 
lence, or their contraries. Could its moral teachers frame an 
ethical system founded on qualities, whose very existence 
their language, and of course the conscious self-knowledge 
of the people, did not recognize ? Could they enforce the 
duty of truthfulness in word and deed ; of a reverential def- 
erence to what is great and worthy in man ; of love and 
adoration for the immeasurably higher and better attributes 
of the Deity ; of charity, of philanthropy, of patience, and 
of resignation, in a tongue which possessed no terms to de- 
note the moral and the religious virtues ? But even these 
alone would not render a language an adequate medium for 
the communication of all moral doctrine. Men must learn to 
fear, hate and abhor that which is evil, as well as to love 
and follow after that which is good ; and to this end, the 
vices, as well as the virtues, must have names by which they 
can be described and held up as things to be dreaded, 
loathed and shunned. We regard the Hebrew-Greek dic- 
tion of the New Testament as eminently plain and simple, 
and so indeed it is, as compared with the general dialect of 
Greek literature ; but what a richness of vocabulary does it 
display with respect to all that concerns the moral, the spir- 
itual, and even the intellectual interests of humanity ! What 
a range of abstract thought, what an armory of dialectic 
weapons, what an enginery of vocal implements for operat- 
ing on the human soul, do the Epistles of the learned Paul 
exhibit ! The Gospel of the unschooled John throws for- 
ward most conspicuously another phase of language ; for, as 
Paul appeals to the moral, through the intellectual faculties, 



228 ETHICAL CHARACTER OF WORDS. 

John, on the other hand, finds his way to the head by the 
channel of the heart, and his diction is of course in great 
part composed of the words which describe or excite the sensi« 
bilities, the better sympathies of onr nature. ISTow the respec- 
tive dialects of these two apostles could have existed only as 
the result of a long course of mental and religious training in 
the races who used the speech employed by them, and where 
such training has not been enjoyed, there no such vocabulary 
can be developed, and of course no such doctrine expressed 

Hence the translation of the Bible into the tongues of 
nations of low moral training has been found a matter of ex- 
ceeding difficulty, and, in many instances, the translators 
have been obliged to content themselves with very loose ap- 
proximations to the expression of the religious ideas of Chris- 
tianity, with mere provisional phrases, which they necessarily 
employ for the time, and until, with more advanced mental 
culture, there shall grow up also a greater compass of vocab- 
ulary, and a fuller development of a dialect suited to convey 
moral as well as intellectual truth. And hence it is that in 
the propagation of a religion which appeals so powerfully to 
the thought, the sympathies and the conscience of men, edu- 
cation and Christianization must go hand in hand ; for the 
teacher cannot reach the heart of his pupil, until they have 
mutually aided each other in creating a common medium, 
through which they can confer on the deep matters of moral 
and spiritual truth. 

The French boast that they have no word for hrihe, and 
hence argue that they are less accessible than other men to 
that species of official corruption, of which a pecuniary, or 
other material consideration, is the reward. But has not the 
reproach implied in the very word a useful influence in bring 



ETHICAL CHARACTER OF WORDS. 229 

mg the act to the consciousness of men as a shame an J a sin r ! 
Can we fully comprehend the evil character of a wrong, until 
we have given it a specific objective existence by assigning 
to it a name, which shall serve at once to designate and con- 
demn ? And do not the jocular pot de vin, and other 
vague and trivial phrases, by which, in the want of a proper 
term to stigmatize the crime, French levity expresses it, in- 
dicate a lack of sensibility to the heinous nature of the trans- 
gression, and gloss over, and even half commend, the recep- 
tion of unlawful fees, as at worst but a venial offence, the 
disgrace of which lies more in the detection than in the com- 
mission ? * 

I drew your attention, on a former occasion, to the re- 
markable completeness of the technical vocabulary of Chris- 
tianity in Anglo-Saxon, as exemplified in the old translation 
of the Gospels ; and I think it is much to be regretted that 
the great English theologians of the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries did not endeavor, at a period when it would 
have been comparatively easy, to infuse a still larger propor- 
tion of the native element into the moral and spiritual no- 
menclature they adopted. The extent to which Latin was 
used in theology by the Saxons themselves, seriously inter- 
fered with the tormation of a vocabulary adapted to the met- 
aphysics of Christianity, and we must remember that, as 
Latin was the only common language, and practicable means 

* "When Justinian negotiated with the Persian ambassador Isdiagunas that 
shameful convention, by which he purchased a truce of five years for two thou- 
Band pounds of gold, it was at first proposed that the money should be paid in 
annual instalments of four hundred pounds, but upon further consideration, it 
Was thought better to pay the whole at otico, in order that it might be called a 
present, rather than a tribute. Ta yap alaxpa. b v 6 /x a t a , says Procopius, 6v tA 
k p dy fx. ar a cicbdacrii' &y!bpc»Troi in tov iirnrKitaroi/ ataxic (rdcu. Dc Bel. Goth 
L. IV. cap. 15. 



230 KELIGI0US TEEMS. 

of communication, between the English Reformers and then 
teachers and brethren on the continent, the dialect of the 
former could hardly fail to be affected by the religious no- 
menclature of the latter. 

We have, nevertheless, and exclusively employ, many 
remarkable native English words to express the highest and 
most complex order of religious ideas, and the frequency and 
familiarity of their use implies an advanced spiritual "culture 
among the primitive English, a philosophical conception of 
Christian doctrine, and a strong native susceptibility to relig- 
ious impressions, as well as a remarkable power of appre- 
hending abstruse principles, and of course a high standard 
of moral and intellectual character. 

The word atonement, certainly one of the most important 
terms in the nomenclature of Christianity, is purely English, 
although its ending is French. The historical evidence is 
very strongly in favor of the etymology at one, and accord- 
ingly the derivative should mean either the reconciliation of 
man to his Creator, or a oneness of spirit between the two. * 
But this is not the usual theological sense, and the resem- 
blance between atone and the German Suhne, and several 

* Robert of Gloucester has at on, in the sense of agreed, reconciled: 
Wat halt it to telle longe ? bute heo were seppe at on, 
In gret loue longe y now, wan yt nolde oper gon. 

P. 161. 
So that the king & he 
Were there so at on as hii mizte bise 

P. 509. 
Many similar examples may be found in other early English writers. I have 
not observed the noun atonement in any writer before Tyndal (1526) who em- 
ploys it in Romans v. 11. It is not found in the Wycliffite versions, I believe. 
Coverdale (1535) uses it, in Exodus xxix. 38, Leviticus iv. 20, 26, Romans v. 
11, and in several other passages. It also occurs in the life of Edward V., as- 
cribed to Sir Thomas More, in Hardyng's Chronicles, 1543, p. 476 of Elba's 
feprint. 



RELIGIOUS TEEMS. 231 

older Gothic roots which involve the notion of expiation, 
furnishes some reason to suspect that the real origin of the 
word lies further back, though we cannot trace it to any 
known Saxon radical. God, good, holy, had, evil, sin, wicked, 
right, wrong, love, hate,* hope, wise, true, false,f life, death, 
soul, heaven, hell, and their many derivatives, are all genuine 
Anglo-Saxon, as are also many now obsolete words, belong- 
ing exclusively to the Christian religion, such as housel, for 
eucharist, aneal^ to administer extreme unction, though most 

* What a fine English definition of hate is that which Chaucer gives in the 
Persones Tale, " Hate is old wrathe." See App. 38. 

f We cannot perhaps make out an etymological relation between false and 
any Moeso-Gothic root, unless we connect it with faldan, to fold, Lat. 
plicare, allied to which are simplex and duplex, whence our simplicity 
and duplicity. But the word occurs very early in all the Scandinavian and 
Teutonic languages, and there are several native radicals from either of which 
it may be supposed to be derived, if indeed we are to believe that the name of 
so fundamental an idea as that of the false must necessarily be borrowed from 
any other word. Ihre, in arguing against the etymology from the Latin 
falsus, regrets that he is obliged to recognize the word as indigenous, and 
exclaims, Quam vellem in laudem gentis nostrae dici posse, illaru mendacia et 
fallcndi artes ne nominare quidera potuisse, antequam id a Latinis didicerit ! 
Hi re, Lex. Suio-Goth. under falsk. 

The comparison of the moral significance of particular words in Anglo- 
Saxon and English, presents many points of interest. A single one shall 
suffice. Old, which is now a term of reproach, was, strange as it may seem 
in these fast days of Young America and Young England, a respectful and 
even reverential epithet with the Anglo-Saxons ; so much so, in fact, that it was 
the common designation of noble, exalted, and excellent things. E a 1 d o r waa 
often used for prince, ruler, governor; ealdordom was authority, magistracy, 
principality; ealdorlic, principal, excellent; ealdor-apostole, chief- 
apostle ; ealdor-burh, chief city or metropolis, and ealdorman, nobleman. 

\ Ele or ffil, the root of the word aneal, is geuerally considered an 
Anglo-Saxon radical, but its resemblance in form and meaning to the Latin 
oleum, or rather to the Greek i\aiou, renders it probable that the name, as 
well as the thing, (olive oil,) found its way from Southern Europe into the Anglo- 
Saxon and the cognate languages and nations, at so early a period that the 
history of its introduction can be no longer traced. Housel (A. S. husel) 
has been suspected to be connected with the Latin hostia, but the occur- 
rence of the word (h u n s 1) in Ulphilas seems to be as ifficient refutation oi 
this etymology. 



232 RELIGIOUS TEEMS. 

of the words which Christianity ingrafted upon the religious 
vocabulary of Judaism, are in modern English represented 
by derivatives from Latin or Greek radicals. 

Both the moral and the intellectual characteristics which 
the prevalence of Christian doctrine has impressed on modern 
civilized humanity, and the dialect belonging to that doc 
trine, are so special and peculiar, that the mutual relations 
between mind, and speech as the expression of mind, and as 
also a reagent upon it, in all matters connected with religion, 
are traced without any very serious difficulty, but the recip- 
rocal influence of word and thought in other connections, is, 
if not more obscure, at least less familiar. Take for example 
the tendency, in what are fashionable, and claim to be refined, 
circles in this country, and perhaps even more especially in 
England, to the use of vague and indefinite phrases, not 
so much to hide a deficiency of ideas, as to cover discreet 
reticences of opinion, or prudent suppressions of natural and 
spontaneous feeling. The practice of employing these empty 
sounds — they have no claim to be called words — is founded 
partly in a cautious desire of avoiding embarrassing self-com- 
mittals, and partly in that vulgar prejudice of polite society, 
which proscribes the expression of decided sentiments of 
admiration, approval or dissatisfaction, or of precise and 
definite opinions upon any subject, as contrary to the laws 
of good taste, indicative of a want of knowledge of the world, 
and, moreover, arrogant and pedantic. In this notion there 
is just enough of truth to disguise the falsehood of the the- 
ory, and to apologize for the mischievous tendencies of the 
practice. Doubtless, if we have no clear, decided and well- 
grounded opinions, no ardor of feeling, and no convictions 
^f duty, in reference to the subject of conversation, we 



REACTION OF WORDS. 233 

should modestly avoid the use of pointed language, and, at 
the same time, a due regard for the feelings, the prejudices, 
the ignorance, of others, will dictate a certain reserve and 
caution in the expression of opinions or sentiments which 
may wound their pride, or violently shock their preposses- 
sions. 

But the habit of using vague language at all, and es- 
pecially the current devices for hinting much while affirming 
nothing, are in a high degree injurious both to precision and 
justness of thought, and to sincerity, frankness, and manli- 
ness of character. Every vague and uncertain proposition 
has its false side, and the confusion of thought it implies is 
not more oifensive to good taste, than its deceptive character 
to sound morality, and than both to true refinement. 

There is a fact of immense moral significance, which 
seems to have been only in modern, indeed in comparatively 
recent times, brought into notice, and made matter of distinct 
consciousness, though accessible to the observation of men 
ever since words first had a moral meaning. Its discovery 
is perhaps connected with the increased attention which in- 
dividual words, their form and force, have received in the 
study of the philosophy of language. It is one of those 
instances where, in the progress of humanity, we come sud- 
denly upon the outcrop of one of those great truths, which, 
like some rock-strata, extend for many days' journey but a 
few inches beneath the surface, and then burst abruptly into 
full view.* 

The fact to which I allude is that language is not a dead, 

* Thus the iniquity of the slavc-trado was suddenly brought home, as a sin, 
to the conscience of otherwise good men, who had for ninny years pursued it, 
without one reproachful ft-eling, one thought of its enormous wickedni 



234 REACTION OF WORDS. 

unelastic, passive implement, but a power, wlieh, lite al 
natural powers, reacts on that which it calls into exercise. 
It is a psychological law, though we know not upon what ulti- 
mate principle it rests, that the mere giving of verbal utter 
ance to any strong emotion or passion, even if the expression 
be unaccompanied by any other outward act, stimulates and 
intensifies the excitement of feeling to that degree that when 
the tongue is once set free, the reason is dethroned, and brute 
nature becomes the master of the man.* The connection be- 
tween the apparently insignificant cause and the terrible 
effect belongs to that portion of the immaterial man, whose 
workings, in so many fields of moral and intellectual action, 
lie below our consciousness, and can be detected by no effort 
of voluntary self-inspection. But it is an undoubted fact, 
and a fact of whose fearful import most men become ade- 
quately aware only when it is almost too late to profit by the 
knowledge, that the forms in which we clothe the outward 
expression of the emotions, and even of the speculative opin- 
ions, within us, react with mighty force upon the heart and 
intellect which are the seat of those passions and those 
thoughts. So long as we have not betrayed by unequivocal 
words the secret of the emotions that sway the soul, so long 
as we are uncommitted by formal expressions to particular 
principles and opinions, so long we are strong to subdue the 
rising passion, free to modify the theories upon which we aim 

* Spenser was not ignorant of this important law. 

" But his enemie 
Had kindled such coles of displeasure, 
That the goodman noulde stay his leasure, 
But home him hasted with furious heate, 
Encreasing his wrath with many a threate." 

The Shepheards Calendar, Fifcruarie, 190-4. 



REACTION OF WORDS. 235 

to fashion our external life. Fiery words are the hot blast 
that inflames the fuel of our passionate nature, and formu- 
lated doctrine a hedge that confines the discursive wander- 
ing of the thoughts. In a personal altercation, it is most 
often the stimulus men give themselves by stinging words, 
that impels them to violent acts, and in argumentative discus- 
sions, we find the most convincing support to our conclusions 
in the internal echo of the dogmas we have ourselves pro- 
nounced. Hence extreme circumspection in the use of vitu- 
perative language, and in the adoption of set phrases imply- 
ing particular opinions, is not less a prudential than a moral 
duty, and it is equally important that we strengthen in our- 
selves kindly sympathies, generous impulses, noble aims, and 
lofty aspirations, by habitual freedom in their expression, and 
that we confirm ourselves in the great political, social, moral, 
and religious truths, to which calm investigation has led us, 
as final conclusions, by embodying them in forms of sound 
words. 

Not merely the strongest thinkers, and ablest and most 
convincing reasoners, but many of the most impressive and 
persuasive rhetoricians of modern times, have been remarka- 
ble rather for moderation than exaggeration in expression. 
It was a maxim of Webster's, that violence of language was 
indicative of feebleness of thought and want of reasoning 
power, and it was his practice rather to understate than over- 
tate the strength of his confidence in the soundness of his 
own arguments, and the logical necessity of his conclusions. 
He kept his auditor constantly in advance of him, by sugges- 
tion rather than by strong asseveration, by a calm exposition 
of considerations which ought to excite feeling in the heart 
of both speaker and hearer, not by an undignified and llieat- 



236 MODERATION IN LANGUAGE. 

rical exhibition of passion in himself. And this indeed .s the 
sound practical interpretation of the Horatian precept : 

Si vis me flere, dolendum est 
Primuni ipsi tibi. 

Wouldst thou unseal the fountain of my tears, 
Thyself the signs of grief must show. 

To the emotion of the hearer, the poet applies a stronger word, 
flere, to weep, than to that of the speaker or actor, who best 
accomplishes the aims of his art by a more mitigated display 
of the passions he would excite in the breast of his audience. 
Although our inherent or acquired moral and intellectual 
character and tendencies, and our habitual vocabulary and 
forms of speech, are influential upon each other, and though 
both are subject to the control of the will, yet, never- 
theless, their reciprocal action is not usually matter of con- 
sciousness with us. While therefore we are free in the em- 
ployment of particular sets of words, yet as the selection of 
those words depends upon obscure processes, unintelligible 
even to ourselves, we cannot be said, in strict propriety of 
speech, to choose our dialect, though we are undoubtedly re- 
sponsible for its moral character, because we are responsible 
for the moral condition which determines it. So limited is 
our self-knowledge in this respect, that most men would be 
unable to produce a good caricature of their own individual 
speech, and the shibboleth of our personal dialect is gen- 
erally unknown to ourselves, however ready we may be to 
remark the characteristic phraseology of others. It is a mark 
of weakness, of poverty of speech, or at least of bad taste, 
to continue the use of pet words, or other peculiarities of 
language, after we have once become conscious of them a? 



CHOICE OF DICTION. 237 

such. In dialect as in dress, individuality, founded upon 
any thing but general harmony and superior propriety, ia 
offensive, and good taste demands that each shall please by 
its total impression, not by its distinguishable details. 



LECTURE XI. 

VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGJAGE. 
IV. 

1 endeavored in the last lecture to point out some of tlie 
relations between the moral and intellectual character of na- 
tions or individuals and the words of a given language em- 
ployed at particular periods, by the people or the man. But 
speech is affected also by humbler, more transitory, and more 
superficial influences, and whatever care we may exercise in 
this respect, it is scarcely possible that our ordinary discourse 
should not exhibit indelible traces of the associations and ac- 
cidents of childhood, as well as of the occupations and the 
cares, the objects and studies, the material or social struggles, 
the triumphs or defeats, and, in short, all the external condi- 
tions that affect humanity in riper years. Every mode of 
life, too, has its technical vocabulary, which we may exclude 
from our habitual language, its cant which we cannot, and 
hence an acute observer, well schooled in men and things, can 
read in a brief casual conversation with strangers much of 
the history, as well as of the opinions, and the principles of 
all the interlocutors. 

Writers of works of fiction are much inclined to represent 



PROFESSIONAL DIALECT. 239 

their characters as constantly employing the langtage of their 
calling, and as prone to apply its technicalities to objects of 
an entirely diverse nature. Now this may, in the drama, 
where formal narrative, description and explanation of all 
sorts are to be avoided, serve as a convenient conventional 
mode of escaping the asides, the soliloquies, the confidential 
disclosures of the actor to his audience respecting his charac- 
ter, position and purposes, and the other awkward devices to 
which even the expertest histrionic artisans are sometimes 
obliged to resort, to make the action more intelligible. It is 
better that a character in a play should use professional 
phrases, by way of indicating his occupation, than that he 
should tell the audience in set words, " I am a merchant, a 
physician, or a lawyer," but after all, considered as a repre- 
sentation of the actual language of life, it is a violation of 
truth of costume to cram with technical words the conversa- 
tion of a technical man.* All men, except the veriest, narrow- 
est pedants in their craft, avoid the language of the shop, and 
a small infusion of native sense of propriety prevents the 
most ignorant laborer from obtruding the dialect of his art 
upon those with whom he communicates in reference to mat- 
ters not pertaining to it. Every man affects to be, if not 
socially above, yet intellectually independent of and superior 
to, his calling, and if in this respect his speech bewray him, 
it will be by words used in mere joke, or by such peculiari- 
ties of speech, as, without properly belonging to the exercise 
of his profession, have nevertheless been occasioned by it. A 

* King James, in his treatise of the Airt of Scottis Poesie, lays down a 
contrary rule : 

And finally, quhatsumeuer be zour subiect, to vse vocabula artis, quhairby 
zc may the mair vivelie represent that persoun, quhais pairt ze paint out.-— 
Chap. III. 



240 SPECIAL PHRASEOLOGIES. 

sailor will not be likely to interlard his go-ashore talk with 
clew-lines, main-sheets, and halliards, but if he has occasion 
to mention the great free port at the head of the Adriatic, he 
will call it not Trieste, but Tryeast ; and if he speaks of our 
commercial representative at a maritime town, he will be 
Bure to style that official the American counsel, not the Amer 
ican consul. In fact, classes, guilds, professions, boriow their 
characteristics of speech from the affectations, not the serious 
interests, of their way of life. 

Technical nomenclature rarely extends beyond the sphere 
to which it more appropriately belongs, and the language of 
a nation is not perceptibly affected by the phraseology of a 
class, unless that class is so numerous as to constitute the ma- 
jority, or unless its interests are of so wide-spread and con- 
spicuous a nature as to be forced upon the familiar observa- 
tion of the whole people. England has been distinguished 
above all the nations of the earth for commercial enterprise 
and mechanical production, but her navigation is confined to 
the sea-coast, her manufacturing industry to comparatively 
restricted centres. Of course, so far as foreign trade and 
domestic fabrics are concerned, the names of the new objects 
which they have brought to the notice of all English-born 
people, have become familiar to all ; but, nevertheless, we do 
not find that metaphors from the dialect of the sea, or tech- 
nicalities from the phraseology of the workshop, are much 
more frequent in the literature or popular speech of England 
than in those of countries with little navigation or mechani- 
cal industry. On the other hand, figures drawn from agri- 
culture, which is universal, and from those arts which, like 
spinning and weaving, the fishery and the chase, in early 
stages of society entered into the life of every household, 



NEW WOKDS, ,RIGES T OF. 241 

are become essential elements of both the poetical and the 
every-day dialect of every civilized people. 

In language, general effects are produced only by causes 
general in their immediate operation. Nor is the fact that 
new words, originated by causes local in their source and ap- 
parently trivial and transitory in action, not infrequently 
pass into the common vocabulary of the nation, at all in 
conflict with this principle, for, in such cases, the general 
reception of the word is indicative of a general want of it, 
to express some common idea just making its way into dis- 
tinct consciousness, and waiting only for a formula, an ap- 
propriate mode of utterance. 

"Whenever a people, by emigration into a different soil 
and climate, by a large influx of foreigners into its territory, 
by political or religious revolutions, or other great and com- 
prehensive social changes, is brought into contact with new 
objects, new circumstances, new cares, labors and duties, it 
is obviously under the necessity of framing or borrowing new 
words, or of modifying the received meaning of old ones, in 
such way as to express the new conditions of material exist- 
ence, the new aims and appetencies, to which the change in 
question gives birth. 

If we could suppose the whole population of a Greek isl- 
and to be transported to America, dispersed among us, and, 
after being detained long enough to learn our language and 
forget their own, to be restored to their native soil, to resume 
their former habits of life, and thenceforward to continue to 
exist, without communication with neighboring islands or 
foreign countries, but otherwise in the same circumstances 
under which the people of the Grecian archipelago and main- 
land nave formed the Greek character and the Greek speech, 
16 



242 NEW USES OF WOBDS. 

they and their posterity would certainly not re-create and re-de- 
velop the Hellenic tongue, but they would retain the English as 
their national language, modifying it according to the exigen- 
cies of their situation, and it would, in the course of time, 
become a very different dialect from that which they had 
brought back with them. But what would be the nature of 
the change? Probably not in radical syntactical principle 
or other grammatical peculiarities, but mainly, doubtless, in 
the vocabulary. New words would be formed by derivation 
or composition, to express a multitude of objects, processes 
and conditions, for which English has no appropriate desig- 
nations, but a still greater divergence from the original tongue 
would be produced by the employment of English words in 
new or modified senses. All this, in fact, is just what has 
been done, by the people of whom I am speaking, with the 
language of their country. Causes, to which I shall refer in 
discussing the subject of grammatical inflections, have con- 
siderably modified the Greek syntax in the passage from old 
Hellenic to modern Romaic, but a greater apparent change 
has been produced by the introduction of new words ; a 
greater still, which is not apparent, except upon a considera- 
ble familiarity with, both classic and modern Greek, by the 
use of classical words in senses very diverse from those which 
originally belonged to them. 

A more familiar illustration may be found in the speech 
of our own country. At the period when European colonists 
first took possession of the Atlantic coast of America, natu- 
ral history had taught men little of the inexhaustible variety 
of the material creation. The discoverers expected to find the 
same animals, the same vegetables, the same minerals, and 
even the same arts, with which observation had made them 



NEW USES OF WORDS. 243 

familiar in corresponding latitudes of the eastern hemisphere. 
They came therefore prepared to recognize resemblances, not 
to detect differences, between the products of the old world 
and the new, and naturally saw what they sought and ex- 
pected. Their early reports accordingly make constant men- 
tion of plants, animals, and mechanical processes, as of com- 
mon occurrence in America, but which we now know never 
to have existed on this continent. Longer acquaintance 
with the nature and art of the newly discovered territory 
corrected the errors of the first hasty observation ; but there 
was still, though almost never an identity, yet often a strong 
analogy, between the trees, the quadrupeds, the fish, and the 
fowl of England, of France, and of Spain, on the one hand, 
and of Canada, New England, Virginia and Mexico on the 
other. The native names for all these objects were hard to 
pronounce, harder still to remember, and the colonists, there- 
fore, took the simple and obvious method of applying to the na- 
tive products of America the names of the European plants and 
animals which 'most nearly resembled them. Thus, we have 
the oak, the pine, the poplar, the willow, the fir, the beach 
and the ash ; the trout, the perch and the dace ; the bear, the 
fox and the rabbit ; the pigeon, the partridge, the robin and 
the sparrow ; and in South America, the lion and the ostrich ; 
and yet, though the American and the transatlantic object 
designated by these names in many instances belong to the 
same genus, and are only distinguished by features which 
escape all eyes but those of the scientific naturalist, in per- 
haps none are they specifically identical, while, not unfre- 
quently, the application of the European name is founded on 
very slight resemblances. 

Since the Norman Conquest, English, as spoken upon its 



244 SPECIAL USES OF -WORDS. 

native soil, lias been largely exposed to but one of the causes 
of change which I have noticed. I refer, of course, to the 
great religions revolution of the sixteenth century, which I 
believe to be the most powerful of the single influences that 
have concurred to give to the English race and their speech 
the character which now distinguishes them, as well from the 
rest of the world as from their former selves. At the same 
time, in all the Gothic languages, our own included, both the 
special vocabulary of each, and the use and signification of the 
words they possess in common, have been much affected by 
other causes, partly peculiar to one or more, partly acting 
alike upon all. 

Take as an instance the word winter. When Icelandic 
was spoken in all the conntries of Scandinavia, time was 
computed by winters, because in those cold climates the win- 
ter monopolized a large portion of the year, and from its 
length, its hardships and necessities, its boisterous festivities, 
the facilities it afforded for the pursuit of certain important 
occupations and favorite sports, and the obstacles it inter- 
posed to the prosecution of others, it impressed itself on the 
minds of the people as not only the longest, but the weigh- 
tiest portion of the twelvemonth, and it therefore stood for 
the whole year. For the same reason, winter was a very 
common word for year in Anglo-Saxon, and it continued to 
be employed in that sense in English to near the close of the 
fifteenth century. In Iceland itself, where there is little 
change in the habits of material and social life, it is still thus 
used. But in modern England, Denmark, Sweden and Nor- 
way, the advancement of civilization and physical improve- 
ment has given to man the mastery over all the seasons. The 
campaigns of feudal warfare, whose marches were performed 



SPECIAL USES OF WORDS. 24.5 

with greater ease over ice and snow, have ceased ; the chase, 
a winter occupation, is no longer an important resource ; ag- 
riculture has widely extended her domain, and the harvest 
months are the great epoch of the year, and characterize it as 
a period of trial or of blessings. Accordingly, in all these 
kingdoms men now count time not by winters, but by har- 
vests, for that is the primitive signification of our English 
word year, and its representative in the cognate languages.* 
In the figurative style, whether in poetry or in prose, we 
often put a season for the year, and in this case the subject 
determines the choice of the season. Thus, of an aged man 
we say : ' His life has extended to a hundred winters,' but in 
speaking of the years of a blooming girl, we connect with 
them images of gladness, the season of flowers, and say : 
1 She has seen sixteen summers.' We have in English a sim- 
ilar application of another familiar word suggestive of the 
phases of the year, and it is curious that the same expression 
is used in Scandinavia. In Denmark and Sweden, as well as 
in England, the gentlemen of the chase and the turf reckon 
the age of their animals by springs, the ordinary birth-season 
of the horse, and a colt is said to be so many years old next 
grass. 

* I am aware that this is not the received etymology of year, nor d; I 
propose it with by any means entire confidence. At the same time, I thin!: ib"j 
identity of the words for harvest and for the twelvemonth, ar, in the ogn&Je 
Icelandic and the dialects derived from it, an argument of considerable weight 
in support of the derivation, which, however, finds still stronger evidence in 
the analogies of our primitive mother-tongue. In Anglo-Saxon, ear signifies 
an ear of grain, and by supplying the collective prefix g e , common to all the 
Teutonic languages, we have gear, an appropriate expression for harvest, and 
at the same time a term, which, as well as winter, was employed as the name of 
the entire year. The corresponding words in the cognate languages admit of a 
similar derivation, and this to me seems a more probable etymology, than thosa 
by whicr these words are connected with remoter ro:>ts. 



246 SPECIAL USES OF WORDS. 

Our adjective pecuniary is familiarly known to be derived 
frcm the Latin p e c n n i a , money, which itself comes from 
peens, cattle, and acquired the meaning of money, because 
money is the representative of property, and in early society 
cattle constituted the most valuable species of property ; or, 
as others suppose, because a coin, which was of about the 
average value of one head of sheep or kine, was stamped 
with the image of the creature. Our English word cattle is 
derived, by a reverse process, from the Low Latin cat alia, 
a word of unknown etymology, signifying movable property 
generally, or what the English law calls chattels. In old 
English, cattle had the same meaning, and it is but recently 
that it has been confined to domestic quadrupeds as the most 
valuable of ordinary movable possessions. 

In a former lecture, by way of illustrating my views of the 
value of etymology as pursued by what may be called the sim- 
ple historical, in distinction from the more ambitious linguis- 
tic, method, I traced the word grain from its source, through 
its secondary, to its present signification, in one of its senses. 
Corn, the Gothic etymological equivalent of grain, has also 
an interesting history, and it serves as a good exemplification 
of the modifications which the use and meaning of words 
unaergo from the influence of local conditions. Like gran-' 
v. m , it signifies both a seed and a minute particle, and the 
two words are not so unlike in form as to make it at all im- 
probable that they are derived from a common radical, in 
some older cognate language, allied to the verb to grow, and 
originally meaning seed. Corn was early applied, as a generic 
term, to the cereal grains or breadstuff's, the most useful of 
seeds, and in fact almost the only ones regularly employed 
as the food of man. The word is still current in all countries 



SPECIAL USES OF W^KDS. 24:7 

where the Gothic languages are spoken, bnt its significatioE 
is, in popular use, chiefly confined to the particular grain 
most important in the rural economy of each. Thus in Eng- 
land, wheat, being the most considerable article of cultivated 
produce, is generally called corn. In most parts of Germany 
this name is given to rye ; in the Scandinavian kingdoms, t 
barley ; and in the United States, to our great agricultural 
staple, maize, or Indian corn ; the name in every instance 
being habitually applied to the particular grain on which the 
prosperity of the husbandman and the sustenance of the la- 
borer chiefly depend. 

In the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, and in 
other warm climates, animal food is not much used, and 
bread is emphatically the staff of life. Hence in those na- 
tions, as with the ancient Romans, the word bread stands for 
food generally, other edibles being considered a mere relish 
or accompaniment, and this is still true of some colder cli- 
mates, where the poverty of the laboring classes coniines 
them in the main to a like simple diet. The English figura- 
tive use of bread for the same purpose, however, is not 
founded on the habits of the people, but is borrowed from 
other literatures. The word meat has undergone a contrary 
process. The earliest occurrence of this word in any cognate 
language is the form mats in Ulphilas, where it signifies 
food in general. The Swedish verb matt a, to satiate or 
satisfy, and other allied words, suggest the probability that 
the original sense of the radical, in its application to food, 
was that which satisfies hunger,* though it must be confessed 

* The Moeso-Gothic m a t j a n , to eat, is more probably a derivative, 
than the primitive, of mats, and if so, corresponds to our verb to feed upon, 
On the other hand the resemblance between matjan and the Latin masti 
care would seem to refer both verbs and their derivatives to a root expressive 
of the mechanical process of eating. 



248 SPECIAL TTSES OF WORDS. 

that great "uncertainty attends all attempts to trace back 
words essentially so primitive to still simpler forms and less 
complex significations. The Anglo-Saxon and oldest English 
meaning of meat is food, and I believe it is always used in 
that sense in onr English translations of the Bible. In Eng- 
land, and especially in the United States, animal fool is now 
the most prominent article of diet, and meat has come' to sig- 
nify almost exclusively the flesh of land animals. 

The primitive abundance of the oak, and of nut-bearing 
trees in England, and the northern portions of continental 
Europe, facilitated the keeping of swine to an extent which, 
now that the forests have been converted into arable land, is 
neither convenient nor economically advantageous, and the 
flesh of swine constituted a more important part of the ali- 
ment of the people than that of any other domestic animal. 
The word flesh appears to have originally signified pork 
only, and in the form, & flitch of bacon, the primitive sense is 
still preserved, but, with the extension of agriculture, the 
herdc of swine became less numerous, and as the flesh of 
other qurdrupeds entered more and more into use, the sense 
of the word was extended so as to include them also. Flesh 
ana. *ieal have now become nearly synonymous, the differ- 
ence oeing that the former embraces the fibrous part of ani- 
mals generally, without reference to its uses, the latter that 
of such only as are employed for human food. At present 
ws use, as a compendious expression for all the materials of 
both vegetable and animal diet, dread and meat. Piers 
Ploughman says : 

Flesshe and breed bothe 
To riche and to poore. 

and a verse or two lower, 



And all manere of men 

That through mete and drynke libbetli. 



CHANGES OF MEANING. 249 

The English word bribe and its derivatives, generally, but 
perhaps erroneously, traced to the French bribe, a morsel 
of bread, a scrap or fragment, present an interesting instance 
of a change of meaning. Bribery, in old English, meant 
not secret corruption, but theft, rapine, open violence, and 
very often official extortion. Tims Julyana Berners, in her 
treatise of Fysshynge with the Angle, in speaking of the 
injustice and cruelty of robbing private fish-ponds and other 
waters, says : " It is a ryght shamefull dede to any nobleman 
to do that that theuys and brybours done." Lord Berners, in 
his translation of Froissart, describes the captain of a band 
of the irregular soldiery called ' companions,' as the " great- 
est brybour and robber in all Fraunce," and Palsgrave gives 
I pull and I pyll as synonyms of I bribe. At that dark 
period, the subject had " no rights which" his rulers "were 
bound to respect." The ministers of civil and ecclesiastical 
power needed not to conceal their rapacity, and they availed 
themselves of the authority belonging to their positions for 
the purpose of undisguised plunder. But when by the light, 
first of religious, and then of what naturally followed, civil lib- 
erty, men were able to see that it was of the essence of law, 
that it should bind the governors as well as the governed, 
him who makes, him who administers, and him who serves 
under it, alike, it became necessary for official robbery to 
change its mode of procedure, and mantle with the cloak of 
secrecy the hand that clutched the spoil. But though the 
primitive form of this particular iniquity is gone, the thing 
remains, and the unlawful gains of power, once seized with 
strong hand, or extorted with menacing clenched fist, but 
now craved with open palm, are still bribes. Formerly the 
official extortioner or rapacious dignitary was styled a briber x 



250 SPECIAL USES OF WORDS. 

and he was said to bribe when he boldly grasped his prey 
but now the tempter is the briber, and the timid recipient u 
the bribed.* 

Soldiery from the Latin solidus,f the name of a coin, 
meant originally one who performed military service, not in 
fulfilment of the obligations of the feudal law, but upon con- 
tract, and for stipulated pay. Soldier, therefore, in its primary 
signification, is identical with hireling or mercenary. But 
the regular profession of arms is held to be favorable to the 
development of those generous and heroic traits of character, 
which, more than any of the gentler virtues, have in all ages 
excited the admiration of men. Hence, since standing 
armies, composed of troops who serve for pay, have afforded 
to military men the means of a systematic professional train- 
ing, including the regular cultivation of the traits in question, 
we habitually ascribe to the soldier qualities precisely the re- 
verse of those which we connect with the terms hireling and 
mercenary, and though the words are the etymological equiva- 
lents of each other, soldier has become a peculiarly honorable 

* Cranmer, Instruction into Christian Religion, Sermon VII., uses bribe in 
the modern sense : " And the iudge himselfe is a thefe before God, when he 
for brybes or any corrupcion doth wittingly and wyllingly give wrong iudge- 
ment." But, in Sermon X., he has this passage : " These rauenynge woulfes, 
that be euer thrystynge after other mennes goodes * * * lese the fauoure 
both of God and man, and ar called of euery man extorcioners, brybers, pollers 
and piellers, deuourers of widowes houses." 

And in the Instruction of Prayer, on the Fourth Petition, " But they that 
delyght in superfluitie of gorgyous apparel and deynty fare * * * commenly 
do deceaue the nedye, brybe, and pyle from them." 

f Etymologists of the Celtic school affirm that sold at is from the Celtic 
Bouldar, a feudal vassal bound to military service, and from soldat they de- 
rive the French sold e and solder, and the German Sold, besolden; that 
is, they find the origin of a group of words, to every one of which the notion of 
pay is fundamental, in a word, the proper sense of which excludes that notion, 
for the very essence of feudal obligation is that it requires service without pay 
Lucus a non lucendo. 



SPECIAL USES OF W:tRDS. 251 

designation, while hireling and mercenary are employed only 
in an offensive sense. 

We may find in the cognate languages examples of 
changes of meaning dependent npon the same principles as 
these illustrations. Among the articles of merchandise sup- 
plied to the population of Denmark and Norway by the 
Hanse towns, during the commercial monopoly they so long 
enjoyed, one of the most important was common pepper, and 
the clerks in the Hanse trading factories in the Scandinavian 
seaports were popularly called Pebersvende, pepper- 
hoys. By the general regulations of the Hanse towns, these 
clerks were obliged to remain unmarried, and hence Peber- 
svend, pepper-boy, became, and still is, the regular Danish 
word for single-man, or old bachelor. 

The herring-fishery was long the most lucrative branch of 
the maritime industry of Holland, and was the means by 
which a large number of the inhabitants of that country ac- 
quired their livelihood. Nering,=German Nahrung, 
in Dutch signifies properly nourishment, sustenance, and, fig- 
uratively, the business or occupation by which men earn 
their bread. The importance of the pursuit of which we 
have just spoken made it emphatically the nering, or vo- 
cation of the Dutch seamen, and ter nering varen 
means to go on a fishing-cruise. The common English and 
American designation of bookselling and booksellers as the 
trade is a similar instance. 

The Greek fjuvcrr^piov meant originally the secret doctrines 
and ceremonies connected with the worship of particular di- 
vinities. In the middle ages, the most difficult and delicate 
processes of many of the mechanical arts were kept relig- 
iously secret, and hence in all the countries of Europe those 
arts were themselves called mysteries, as mechanical trades 



252 EXHAUSTION OF VORDS. 

still are in the dialect of the English law. Thus, whei. a 
boy is apprenticed to a tanner or a shoe-maker, the legal in- 
strument, or indenture, by which he is bound, stipulates that 
lie shall be taught the art and mystery of tanning or shoe- 
rcaking. Afterwards, mystery came to designate, in com- 
mon speech, any regular occupation, so that a man's mystery 
was his trade, his employment, the profession by which he 
earned his bread,* and as men are most obviously classed 
and characterized by their habitual occupations, the question 
which so often occurs in old . English writers, ' What mister 
wight is that ? ' means, what is that man's employment, and, 
consequently, condition in life ? "What manner of man is 
he ? In French, the word has had a different history. From 
mysterium, in the sense of a trade or art, comes metier, 
of the same signification,')' and because, in certain provinces, 
the art of weaving was the most important and gainful of 
the mechanic arts, first weaving, and then the implement by 

* In youthe he lerned hadde a good mistere, 
He was a wel good wright, a carpentere. 

Prol. to Canterbury Tales, 
f This etymology seems to me more probable than the usual one, which de- 
rives mister and metier from the Latin ministerium, because the n in min- 
isterium is radical, and in such combinations is generally, though indeed not 
universally, retained in French and English derivatives. The earliest instance I 
have met with of the use of this word in English, (or semi-Saxon,) is in the ex- 
tracts from the Rule of Nuns in the Reliquiae Antiquae, vol. II., p. 2 : " Marthe 
meostor is to fede povre," where indeed the-sense favors the derivation from min- 
isterium. The old French and English maistrie, craft, art, science, probably 
from the Latin magister (magisterium) and mister, resemble each other 
in use and meaning, and the three words, mister, maistrie, and mystery are so 
nearly alike in form, that they might readily be confounded in signification. 
The Spanish menester, need or necessity, is doubtless from ministerium, 
and the English mister, used in that sense, must probably be referred to the 
same source, but the signification of necessity is so remote from that of occupa- 
tion, that it seems more reasonable to adopt a separate etymology for each. 
Halliwell even derives mistery or mystery in the sense of an occupation, from 
Viister. 



COLLOQUIAL CORRUPTIONS. 253 

which it is exercised, received by way of excellence the name 
metier, which now signifies a loom* 

I have alluded to the remarkable fact, that words* like 
material substances, are changed, worn-ont, exhausted Ox 
their meaning, and at last rendered quite unserviceable, by 
long use. To this law, both their form and their signification 
are subject. In here speaking of form, I do not refer to 
grammatical changes of ending and inflections, which will be 
the subject of future lectures, and which are, in a great 
measure due to other causes, but to modifications produced 
by that negligence of treatment which is the result of close 
familiarity with any object. Examples of this are the abbre- 
viated and otherwise mutilated pet names, by which servants, 
children, and intimate associates, are called. It may be laid 



* Few words have undergone greater and more varied changes of meaning 
than the Latin species. Species is derived from s p e c i o , an old verb 
signifying, I see. Species, then, is that which is seen, the visible form of 
an object. But things are known and distinguished most frequently by their 
visible forms, and related things have like forms. Hence, among other senses, 
species acquired that of kind, or natural class, which is its present most 
usual import. It was then popularly applied to designate the different kinds or 
classes of merchandise, and as the drugs, perfumes, and condiments of the 
East were the most important articles of merchandise, they were called, par 
excellence, species, spezie in Italian, epices in French, spices in 
English, and an apothecary is still termed speziale in Italy, his shop a 
s p e z i e r i a , his drugs s p e z i e r i e . Again, species is the visible form 
of a thing, as distinguished from that which symbolically, or conventionally, 
represents it, and hence, when notes of governments, banks or individuals were 
brought into use as representatives of money, payments in actual coin were said 
to be payments in s p e c i e, in contradistinction from payments in the con- 
ventional equivalent of money, and specie now means gold and silver coin. 

It is curious that when spezie, the common term for different kinds of 
merchandise, was restricted in Italy to drugs and spices, as the most important 
of them, genere orgenero (Latin genus) a group or assemblage of 
species, took its place as a general designation of vendible wares, and is now 
used for goods, asgeneri coloniali, colonial, or as we say, West India 
goods. See Appendix, 40. 



254 COLLOQUIAL CORRUPTIONS. 

down as a general rule, that words most frequently employed 
are hastily and carelessly pronounced, and that, in inflected 
languages, they are, with very few exceptions, irregular in 
form. In this way often grows up a distinction between the 
written and the spoken languages, which, in some cases, is 
carried so far that the formal rules of pronunciation observed 
by the best speakers in conversation, and in reading or in set 
discourse, are so different as almost to amount to a difference of 
dialect, and while he who reads as he speaks would shock by 
the vulgarity, another, who speaks as he reads, would scarce- 
ly less offend the hearer by the pedantic formality of his 
enunciation. In English, a distinction of this sort is not ob- 
ligatory, but tolerated, and it is very commonly practised, 
though, among educated persons, not to such an extent as in 
some of the Continental languages. Thus, don't is very com- 
monly used for do not, and, by careless speakers, even for 
does not ; Fll and you'll, Pd and you'd, for I will, you will, 
I would and you woidd j isn't, arnH, havenH, and won't, 
for is not, are not, have not, and will not. Indeed, we too 
often hear, in the conversation of persons from whom we 
have a right to expect better things, such sad distortions of 
words as haint and aint, and I am sorry to say that Charles 
Lamb has even committed this last transgression in writing, 
in one of his familiar letters to Coleridge. So long as de- 
partures from grammatical propriety of speech are merely 
allowable colloquialisms, not recognized changes in the nor- 
mal form of words, they come rather within the jurisdic- 
tion of social authority ; they are questions of manner, like 
the set phrases of complimentary salutation, and not entitled 
to consideration as exemplifications of the law of progress 
and revolution to which all human language is subject 



MORAL CORRUPTION OF WORDS. 255 

Such licenses of speech rest on no ascertainable principle. 
I shall, therefore, not inquire into their essential linguistic 
character, or the extent to which they may be indulged in 
without infringing the laws of good taste, and I will dismiss 
them with the simple remark that they are substantially cor- 
ruptions of language, and therefore to be employed as spar- 
ingly as possible. 

The changes of signification which words undergo in all 
languages, from mere exhaustion by use, is a far more ex- 
tensive and important subject. " Names and words," says 
Robertson, " soon lose their meaning. In the process of 
years and centuries, the meaning dies off them, like the sun- 
light from the hills. The hills are there, the color is gone." 
It is melancholy to reflect that such changes in the significa- 
tion of words are almost always for the worse. A word un- 
familiar and dignified in one century, becomes common and 
indifferent in the next, trivial and contemptible in a third, 
and this degradation of meaning is too often connected with 
a moral decline in the people, if it does not flow from it. 
" That decay in the meaning of words," observes the same 
admirable sermonizer whom I have just quoted, " that lower- 
ing of the standard of the ideas for which they staud, is a 
certain mark [of the decay of elevated national feeling.] 
The debasement of a language is a sure mark of the debase- 
ment of a nation ; the insincerity of a language of the insin- 
cerity of a nation ; for a time comes when words no longer 
stand for things ; when names are given for the sake of a 
euphonious sound ; and when titles are but the epithets cf 
an unmeaning courtesy." 

The thorough investigation of the principles of these 
changes would require more of psychological discussion, and 



250 MORAL CORRUPTION OF WORDS. 

a more abstruse vein of argument, than can fitly find place 
in a series of unmethodical and unscientific discourses, and 1 
shall content myself with offering a couple of familiar illus- 
trations, which may of themselves suggest important princi- 
ples of language in its relation to ethics, without attempting 
to expound them. Let us take the adjective respectable. 
Respectable was originally, and in French, to the honor of 
that nation, still is, a term of high commendation, and was 
scarcely inferior in force, though not precisely equivalent in 
signification, to admirable in our present use of that word. 
At a later period it implied an inferior degree of worth, little 
above mediocrity, and now, with reference to intellect and 
morality, it has come to mean barely not contemptible, while, 
popularly, it is applied to every man whose pecuniary means 
raise him above the necessity of manual drudgery. Thus, in 
a celebrated criminal trial in England, when a witness was 
asked why he applied the epithet to a person of whom he 
had spoken as a " respectable man," he said it was because he 
kept a horse and gig. 

So the much abused term gentleman. This word origi- 
nally meant, and still does in the French from which we bor- 
rowed it, not, as Webster supposes, a gentle or genteel man, 
but a man born of a noble family, or gens, as it was called 
in Latin. Persons of this rank usually possessed means to 
maintain an outward show of superior elegance, and leisure 
to cultivate the graces of social life, so that in general they 
were distinguished above the laboring classes by a more pre- 
possessing exterior, greater refinement of manners, and a more 
tasteful dress. As their wealth and legal privileges dimin- 
ished with the increasing power and affluence of the citizens 
of the trading towns, there was a gradual approximation, in 



THE WORD GENTLEMAN. 257 

both social position and civil rights, between the poorer gen- 
tleman and the richer burgesses, nntil at last they were dis- 
tinguished by nothing bnt family names, as indicative of 
higher or lower origin. The term gentleman was now ap- 
plied indiscriminately to all persons who kept up the state and 
observed the social forms, which had once been the exclusive 
characteristics of elevated rank. Theoretically, elegance of 
manner and attainment in the liberal arts should imply re- 
finement of taste, generosity of spirit, nobleness of charac- 
ter, and these were regarded as the moral attributes specially 
belonging to those possessed of the outward tokens by which 
the rank was recognized. The advancement of democratic 
principles in England and America, has made rapid progress 
in abolishing artificial distinctions of all sorts. Every man 
claims for himself, and popular society allows to him, the 
right of selecting his own position, and consequently in those 
countries every man of decent exterior and behavior assumes 
to be a gentleman, in manners and in character, and, in the 
ordinary language of life, is both addressed and described as 
such. 

It is much to the credit of England, that popular opinion 
in a remote age attached higher importance to the moral than 
to the material possessions of the gentleman, and accordingly 
we find that as early as the reign of Edward III., the word 
had already acquired the meaning we now give it, when wo 
apply to it the best and highest sense of which it is suscepti- 
ble. In Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, there occurs a pas- 
sage well illustrating this feeling, and it is worth remarking 
that the original Roman de la Rose, of which Chaucer's Ro- 
maunt is an admirable, but improved translation, contains 
no hint of the generous and noble sentiments expressed by 
17 



258 THE WORD GENTLEMAN. 

the English poet, respecting the superiority of moral worth 
and the social virtues over ancestral rank. 

But understand in thine entent 

That this is not mine entendement, 

To clepe no wight in no ages 

Onely gentle for his linages; 

But who so is vertuous 

And in his port not outrageous, 

When such one thou seest thee beforne, 

Though he be not gentle borne, 

Thou maiest well saine this in soth 

That he is gentle, because he doth 

As longeth to a gentleman. 

To villaine speech in no degree 
Let never thy lippe unbounden bee : 
For I nought hold him, in good faith, 
Curteis, that foule wordes saith ; 
And all women serve and preise, 
And to thy power hir honour reise, 
And if that any mis-sayere 
Despise women, that thou maist here, 
Blame him, and bid him hold him still. 

Maintaine thy selfe after thy rent, 

Of robe and eke of garment, 

For many sithe, faire clothing 

A man amendeth in much thing. 

Of shoone and bootes, new and faire, 

Looke at the least you have a paire, 

And that they sit so fetously, 

That these rude may utterly 

Marvaile, sith that they sit so plaine, 

How they come on or off againe. 

Weare streight gloves, with aumere 

Of silke : and alway with good chere 

Thou yeve, if thou have richesse, 

And if thou have nought, spend the lesse. 

The wanton abuse of words by writers in the department 
of popular imaginative literature has been productive of very 
serious injury in language and in ethics. The light ironical 
tone of persiflage, in which certain eminent authors of this 



WANTON ABUSE OF WORDS. 259 

class habitually indulge, has debased our national speech, 
and proved more demoralizing in its tendency than the open 
attacks of some of them upon Christianity, its ministers, and 
its professors, or the fatuity with which others endow all their 
virtuous characters, and the vice, selfishness, and corruption 
which they ascribe to all their personages whom they do not 
make idiots. By such writers, a blackguardly boy is gen- 
erally spoken of as a " promising young gentleman ; " an 
abandoned villain era successful swindler, as a " respectable 
personage ; " a vulgar and ignorant woman, as a" graceful 
and accomplished lady." Had these authors contented them- 
selves with pillorying the pet vulgarisms of the magazine and 
the newspaper, they would have rendered a great service to 
literature and to morals, but when the only words we possess 
to designate the personifications of honor, virtue, manhood, 
grace, generosity and truth, are systematically applied to all 
that is contemptible and all that is corrupt, there is no little 
danger that these high qualities will, in popular estimation, 
share in the debasement to which their proper appellations 
are subjected. It is difficult to suppose that the authors of 
works evincing great knowledge of the world, who habitu- 
ally profane the name of every attribute that men have held 
great and reverend, really believe in the existence of such 
attributes. A man, who accustoms himself to speak of a 
low-minded and grovelling person as a gentleman, either has 
no just conception of the character which this word professes 
to describe, or does not believe in the possibility of it ; and 
the admiring readers of such a writer will end by adopting 
his incredulity, and renouncing the effort to develop and cul- 
tivate qualities, which, in every virtuous community, havo 
formed the highest objects of a noble social ambition. 



LECTURE XL. 

THE 70CABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



The advocates of the theory which regards language aa 
wholly arbitrary, artificial and conventional, as a thing of 
human invention, not of divine origin or of spontaneous 
growth, may find in its mutability a specious, though by no 
means a conclusive, argument in support of that doctrine. 
For things organic, products of the laws of nature, tend al- 
together to the repetition of their typical forms. If changed 
at all in sensible characteristics, the process of their transfor- 
mation is extremely slow, and they exhibit a perpetual incli- 
nation to revert to the primitive type, as often as the disturb- 
ing or modifying influences are withdrawn, or even weakened 
in their action. Human contrivances, institutions, systems, 
on the contrary, are subject to incessant change, nor have 
they any inherent tendency to return to the original form, 
but as they recede from the starting point, they continually 
diverge more and more widely from the initial direction. 
The physical characteristics of animal races, and of the spon- 
taneous vegetable products of the soil, are constant, so long 



CHANGES OF LANGUAGE. 261 

as they remain unmixed in descent, and subject to the same 
climatic and nutritive influences, but in the progress of cen- 
turies, man's laws, his institutions and modes of life, all, in 
short, that is essentially of his invention or voluntary adoption, 
and especially his language, undergo such radical revolu- 
tions, that little apparently remains to attest his relationship 
to his remote progenitors 

But the law of adherence and return to original type, if 
not confined to lower organisms, is greatly restricted in its 
application to more elevated races and forms. Man himself, 
the most exalted of earthly existences, seems almost wholly 
exempt from its operation, and the varieties of his external 
structure, once established, perpetuate themselves with little 
discoverable inclination to revert to any known common and 
primitive model of the species. Man's language is higher 
than himself, more spiritual, more ethereal, and still less sub- 
ject than he to the jurisdiction of the laws of material nature. 
We have therefore no right to expect to find speech returning 
to primeval unity, until the realization of those dreams 
which predict the complete subjugation of material nature, the 
consequent equalization, or at least compensation, of her gifts 
to different portions of the earth's surface, the perfectibility 
of man, and his union in one great universal commonwealth. 
There are, however, well-ascertained facts, which seem to 
show that words, with all their mutability, are still subject 
to a law of reversion like other products of material life, and 
if the distinction which many grammarians make between 
technically modem and ancient languages is well founded, 
and the common tendencies ascribed to the former are inhe- 
rent, and not accidental, we must refer them to the operation 
of a principle as general and as imperative as that by which 
the double-flowers of our gardens are brought back to their 



262 CHANGES OF LANGUAGE. 

original simplicity of structure, by neglect and self propaga- 
tion.* But it is as yet too early to pronounce upon the ulti- 
mate form of language, and we are hardly better able to 
foresee what centuries may bring forth in the character of 
speech, than to prophesy what configuration of surface and 
what forms of animal life will mark our earth in future geo- 
logical periods. Modes of verbal modification, mutations of 
form, indeed, we can readily trace back so far as written 
memorials exist, and the course of change is sometimes so 
constant for a certain period, that we can predict, with some 
confidence, what phase a given living language will next 
present. These observations however respect more particu- 
larly the syntax, the inflections, the proportions of native and 
foreign roots, and other general characteristics of speech. 
Special changes of vocabulary can frequently be explained 
after they have once happened, but very seldom foretold, and 
words sometimes disappear altogether and are lost forever, 
or, like some stars, suddenly rise again to view, and resume 
their old place in both literature and the colloquial dialect, 
without any discoverable cause for either their occultation or 
their emergence. The only portion of the English vocabu- 
lary that can be said to be altogether stable consists of those 
Saxon words which describe the arts and modes of life com- 
mon to all ages and countries, the specific names of natural 
products whose character is unchanging, and of their parts 
and members, and those also of the natural wants and uni- 
versal passions of man. The nomenclature of the more re- 
fined arts and professions, and in general, the alien words 
which have entered into the language of literature and pol- 
ished society, are, on the other hand, subject, not indeed like 

* See Lecture XVII. 



CHANGES IN WORDS. 2<]3 

native words, to a law of development and growth, but to 
perpetual change, frequent rise and decay. 

I alluded on a former occasion to the conservative influ- 
ence of our great writers, and especially of the standard trans- 
lation of the Bible. The dialect of that translation belongs 
to an earlier phase of the language, and it far more resem- 
bles the English of the century preceding than of its own 
contemporary literature. Nevertheless, of the somewhat 
fewer than six thousand words it contains, scarcely two hun- 
dred are now in any sense obsolete, or substantially altered in 
meaning, whereas most of the new or unfamiliar words which 
it sanctioned have fairly established themselves in our gen- 
eral vocabulary, in spite of the attacks which have been so 
often made and repeated against them. It would, however, 
not be fair to compare the language of the English Bible with 
the dialect of the present day by the individual words alone. 
The real difference is not wholly in single words, not even in 
the meaning of them separately considered, but also in com- 
binations of words, phraseological expressions, idioms, or 
rather idiotisms. The translators of 1611 borrowed many of 
these from older versions, whose dialect was going out of use, 
and they now constitute the portion of the authorized Bible, 
which must be regarded as obsolescent. Take, for instance, 
the expression " much people." This was once grammati- 
cally correct, for the following reasons : People and folk, 
(as well as the Saxon equivalent of the latter, folc,) in the 
singular form, usually meant, in Old-English, a political state, 
or an ethnologically related body of men, considered as a 
unit, in short a nation, and both people and folk took the 
plural form when used in a plural sense, just as nation now 
does. Nation is indeed found in the Wycliffite versions, but 
it rarely occurs, and puple or folk in the singular, jouplis 



264 PERMANENCY OF WORDS. 

and folfas in the plural, are generally used where we now 
employ nations. In Tyndale's time, nation had come into 
more general use, while people was losing its older significa- 
tion, and was seldom employed in a plural sense, still more 
rarely in a plural form. In the translation of 1611, I believe 
the plural is found but twice, both instances of its occurrence 
being in the Revelation. Many is essentially plural, and 
there is a syntactical solecism in applying it to a noun, which 
itself does not admit of a plural. While therefore the word 
was hovering between the sense of nation, which may be 
multiplied, and that of an aggregation of persons, which 
may be divided, it was natural, and at the same time syntac- 
tically right, to say much, rather than many, people. King 
James's translators, in this, as in many other points, em- 
ployed the language of the preceding century, not of their 
own, for in the secular literature of their time people had 
settled down into its present signification, and conformed to 
modern grammatical usage. 

An examination of the vocabulary of Shakspeare will 
show that out of the fifteen thousand words which compose 
it, not more than about five or six hundred have gone out of 
currency, or changed their meaning, and of these, some, no 
doubt, are misprints, some, borrowed from obscure provincial 
dialects, and some, words for which there is no other author- 
ity, and which probably never were recognized as English. 

In the poetical works of Milton, who employs about eight 
thousand words, there are not more than one hundred which 
are not as familiar at this day, as in that of the poet himself. 
In fact, scarcely any thing of Milton's poetic diction has be- 
come obsolete, except some un-English words and phrases of 
his own coinage, and which failed to gain admittance at all. 
On the other hand, the less celebrated authors of the same 



OBSOLETE WORDS. 265 

period, including Milton himself as a prcse writer, employ, 
not hundreds, but thousands of words, utterly unknown to 
all save the few who occupy themselves with the study of 
the earlier literature of England. One might almost say 
that the little volume of Bacon's Essays alone contains as 
large a number of words and phrases no longer employed in 
our language, as the whole of Milton's poetical works.* 

English, composed as it is of inharmonious and jarring 
elements, is, more than any other important tongue, exposed 
to perpetual change from the fermentation of its yet unas- 
similated ingredients, and it therefore has always needed, and 
still needs, more powerful securities and bulwarks against in- 
cessant revolution than other languages of less heterogeneous 
composition. The three great literary monuments, the Eng- 
lish Bible, Shakspeare, and Milton, fixed the syntax of the 
sacred and the secular dialects in the forms which they had 
already taken, and perpetuated so much of the vocabulary 
as entered into their composition. It is true there are Con- 
tinental authors, of the seventeenth century, Pascal for in- 
stance, whose style and diction are as far from being anti- 
quated as those of the English classics I have mentioned. 
Doubtless the great literary merits of Pascal, and the pro- 



* Notwithstanding the multitude of new words and recent corruptions which 
we have engrafted upon the Euglish tongue, I am inclined to believe that the 
general dialect of intelligent persons in this country is more archaic than that 
of the corresponding classes in England ; and I ascribe this to the universal 
habit of reading, and especially to the familiarity of the Puritans with the 
English Scriptures. Certainly, no American editor of Bacon's Essays would 
think it necessary, or even respectful to the understanding of his readers, to in- 
form them, as Archbishop Whately (at the suggestion of a friend) has done, 
that vocation means calling, state of life, and duties of the embraced profession ; 
diverse, different ; poesy, poetrv ; contrarywise, on the contrary ; whit, the least 
degree, the smallest particle ; fume, exhalation ; straightways, immediately ; er«, 
before ; and to handle a subject, to treat of, or discuss it. 



2G6 CHANGES IN VOCABULARY. 

found interest of the subjects he discusses, did much to give 
fixedness and stability to the dialect, which serves as the 
vehicle of his keen satire and powerful reasoning, but we 
cannot ascribe to him so great a conservative influence as to 
the master-pieces of English literature, because, though 
French shares in the general causes of linguistic change 
which are common to all Christendom, it has not the same 
special tendencies to fluctuation as our more composite 
speech. Such, in fact, was the unstable character of Eng- 
lish during the century which preceded Shakspeare, that, but 
for the influence of the Reformation and of the three great 
lodestars we have been considering, it would probably have 
become, before our time, rather Romance than Gothic in its 
vocabulary, as well as much less Saxon in its syntax. 

The operation of the numerous causes which contribute 
to the introduction of new words into a given language, is 
generally sufficiently palpable. "Wherever a new expression 
is suited to perform the office and take the place of an older 
one, the disappearance of the latter is easily accounted for. 
But there are numerous instances in the history of speech* 
where not single words only, but whole classes of them sud- 
denly drop out of the vocabulary, and are heard no more. 
Where an event of this sort is connected with changes in the 
processes by which particular ends are accomplished, the old 
words are commonly supplied by new, so that the whole 
number is kept substantially good, but when, on the other 
hand, particular arts cease altogether to be practised, or pass 
out of the domestic circle, where the whole household more 
or less takes part in them, into the hands of large mechanical 
establishments, and become associate and organized, not indi- 
vidual occupations, their nomenclature perishes with them, 
or is restricted to the comparatively narrow circles which 



LOSS OF WORDS. 267 

occupy themselves exclusively in their pursuit. As an exam- 
ple of one of these cases, that namely where the art and ita 
vocabulary become obsolete together, I may mention the em- 
ployment of archery, in war, in the chase, or as a healthful 
and agreeable recreation. If you look into Ascham's Toxophi- 
lus, published in Queen Elizabeth's time, or into any old 
English treatise on the Military Art, you will find numerous 
technical terms belonging to the use of the bow, which three 
hundred years ago were as familiar to every man and boy as 
lock, stock and ban-el are to us, but which have now com- 
pletely vanished out of the common language of life, except 
the few of them that have been retained in proverbs and 
poetic similes. There were bows of a great variety of form 
and materials, and the manufacture of them was a very im 
portant trade by itself. The family names Bowyer and Arch 
er, the latter from the French arc, a bow, are derived from 
the occupations of persons devoted to the making or the use 
of that weapon. The processes employed in the preparation 
of the wood, by seasoning or otherwise, and in the shaping 
and decoration of the bow, were very numerous, and each 
had its appropriate name. The manufacture of arrows was a 
different trade. The arrow was as diversified in form and ma- 
terial as the bow, and the arrow-makers, or fletchers as they 
were called, from the French fleche, an arrow, (whence also 
the family name Fletcher,) had as full a vocabulary as the bow- 
yers. Then came the manufacture of bow- strings, of bow- 
cases and quivers, of bracers for the protection of the left arm 
from the grazing of the string, of shooting gloves, and other in- 
ferior branches of art h longing to the use of the bow, all dis- 
tinct trades, and each 'its distinct, separate stock of tech- 
nical words. Now, a _ have said before, almost the whole 



268 LOSS OF WOKDS. 

of this vocabulary is utterly gone out of our con non speech, 
and the implement, to the construction and employment 01 
which it belonged, having become disused altogether, no new 
words have arisen to take the place of those which have 
grown obsolete. Fire-arms, indeed, have introduced a totally 
different set of expressions, but the bow and the musket have 
so little in common, in form or use, that the word aim is al- 
most the only one that could be applied to both. The tech- 
nical expressions connected with the musket suggest quite 
other ideas than those belonging to the dialect of archery, 
and, therefore, the new phrases cannot be considered as the 
equivalents, or as occupying the place, of the old. The con- 
struction of the musket is more difficult than that of the 
bow, and requires a longer apprenticeship, a much greater 
stock of tools and mechanical contrivances, and a larger cap- 
ital for carrying it on ; the demand for this weapon is much 
less, because one gun will outlast many bows, and for all 
these reasons, both the business of the gunsmith, which has 
become a manufacture, not a handicraft, and its terms of art, 
are less familiar to the people than were those of the bowyer 
and the fletcher. Although, therefore, the musket has brought 
with it many new words, and they are used in the main under 
the same circumstances as the dialect of archery, yet so far 
as the copiousness of popular English is concerned, the sub- 
stitution of the one weapon for the other has been attended 
not only with a great change, but a considerable loss, in the 
daily speech of the numerous class which formerly drew the 
bow, but now handle the musket. 

Again, the improvements in fire-arms and their appurte- 
nances, since their first introductir ve involved almost as 
great changes of nomenclature as th which followed their 



LOSS OF WORDS. 269 

substitution for the bow. The forms and mode c f employ- 
ment of field and siege artillery have been almost completely 
revolutionized, and the technical terms belonging to them 
are wholly different from what they were three hundred 
years ago. The musket of the sixteenth century and the 
improved rifle of the nineteenth differ very widely in their 
details. In fact, they have little in common but their most 
general features, and the professional phraseologies of the 
hackbuteer of Queen Elizabeth's time, and the sharp-shooter 
of Queen Victoria's, resemble each other as little as their 
weapons. 

A large class of words belonging to arts very familiar to the 
last generation in this country, but now no longer practised 
in domestic life, has become virtually obsolete within the 
memory of some who hear me. Let us take the vocabulary 
of American rural industry, and consider the changes which 
the advance of mechanical art, and the increased use of cotton, 
have produced within thirty or forty years in the household 
conversations upon the single subject of family clothing. At 
the period to which I refer, the wool and the flax, which 
formed the raw material of the common dress of the country, 
as well as of the tissues employed for numerous other pur- 
poses in domestic life, were produced upon the homestead. 
They not only underwent the several operations required to 
fit them for the dye-pot, the wheel and the loom, but they 
were spun, woven and often colored, beneath the family roof. 
Connected with all this industry there was an extensive no- 
menclature. First came the technicalities belonging to the 
growing of flax, including the preparation of the ground and 
the seed ; then the sowing, harvesting, rotting, breaking and 
swingling the plant. These were out-door labors. Then fol« 



270 LOSS OF WORDS. 

lowed the household toils, the hetchelling, spinning, reeling, 
spooling, weaving and dyeing or bleaching of the cloth. Each 
of these processes had its appropriate mechanical implements, 
some of them complicated in their construction, and every 
step of the whole succession of labors, every tool and ma- 
chine, and each of its parts, had its appropriate name. The 
manufacture of wool, again, had its vocabulary, in some 
things coincident with, but in many different from, that em- 
ployed with relation to flax, so that the supply of linen and 
woollen cloth for domestic purposes required the use of cer- 
tainly not less than two or three hundred technical words, all 
of which were perfectly intelligible to every inhabitant of the 
country districts. The labors of which I speak extended 
through the whole year, and formed the most important of 
the industrial functions which the mistress of the family par- 
ticipated in and directed, and consequently were prominent 
and constant subjects of family conversation. Now, the 
every-day vocabulary of common colloquial life does not, at 
any one period, comprise more than three or four thousand 
words, and though some of the technical terms I have mentioned 
are still currently used in other applications, yet, for the most 
part, the nomenclature of this great branch of rural industry 
has perished with the industry itself. I think it safe to say, 
that the substitution of cotton for linen, and the supply of tis- 
sues by large manufacturing establishments, instead of by do- 
mestic labor, have alone driven out of use seven or eight per 
cent, of the words which formed the staple of household con- 
versation in the agricultural districts of the Northern States. 
Similar changes have taken place, though not so recently, in 
the domestic dialect of England, and indeed of the principal 
Continental countries. The domestic manufacture of cloths* 



LOSS OF WORDS. 271 

linens especially, was by no means confined to the poor, in a 
somewhat earlier stage of European society, and the words 
belonging to this branch of industry formed almost as con 
spiciious a part of the vocabulary of exalted, as of humble 
life. I may mention, as a proof of this, that in different Ian 
guages the names of different implements employed in spin 
ning have been adopted in very elevated applications, as 
designations of the female sex, which seems to have appro- 
priated that art to itself in all times and countries. Thus, not 
to speak of the phraseology of more primitive ages, in modern 
Danish, the male and female lines of descent and inheritance, 
or as we say, the father's side and the mother's side, are called 
respectively the sword-side and the spinning or spindle-side ; 
and in France, the Salic law, which excludes women from 
the inheritance of the throne, is popularly expressed by the 
proverb that, " The crown does not descend to the distaff." * 

The words that have thus perished have left no represent- 
atives behind them, for the time and thought once employed 
in these humble labors is now devoted to occupations in 
no wise connected with domestic manufactures, occupations 
which have brought a new and wholly unrelated stock of 
words with them. Music, books, monthly and weekly peri- 
odicals, journeys, so much facilitated by the increase of rail- 
roads and steamboats, now fill up many hours formerly labo- 
riously occupied with the cares of household life, and each 
of these has contributed its share of new words to enlarge 
and to enrich the sphere of thought, and the range of vocab- 
ulary belonging to the productive classes. 

Translations from foreign literatures have introduced great 



* Spear-side and spindle-side occur in the will of Alfred as designations of 
the male and female lines. 



272 INTRODUCTION OF NEW WORDS. 

numbers of Continental and new words into English. All 
nations have not only their proper tongues, but their charac- 
teristic ideas, thoughts, tastes, sensibilities, and the vocabu- 
lary adapted to the embodiment of these fails to find equiv- 
alents in the languages of other peoples. Hence a translator 
is not unfrequently obliged either to borrow the, foreign 
word itself, or to frame, by composition or derivation, anoth- 
er, more in accordance with native models, to express to his 
readers an intellectual conception, a taste or an antipathy, 
new not only to their speech, but to their mental and moral 
natures. 

An incident which excites the surprise, or appeals to the 
sympathies, of a whole people will often give a very general 
and permanent currency to a new word, or an expression not 
before in familiar use. Take for example the word coinci- 
dence. The verb coincide and its derivative noun are of 
rather recent introduction into the language. They are not 
found in Minshew, and they occur neither in Shakespeare nor 
in Milton, though they may perhaps have been employed by 
scientific writers of as early a date. They belong to the lan- 
guage of mathematics, and were originally applied to points 
or lines. Thus, if one mathematical point be superposed 
upon another, or one straight line be superposed upon an- 
other straight line between the same two points, or if two 
lines follow the same course, whatever be its curve, between 
two points, then, in the first case the two points, in the latter 
two, the two lines are said to coincide, *and their conformity 
of position is called their coincidence. In like manner, any 
two events happening at the same period, or any two acts or 
states beginning at the same moment, and ending at the same 
moment, are said to coincide in time, and the conjugate noun, 
coincidence, is employed to express the fact that they are 



INTRODUCTION OF NEW WORDS. 273 

contemporaneous. These words soon passed into common 
use, in the same sense, and were applied also figuratively to 
identity of opinion or character in different individuals, as 
well as to many other cases of close similarity or resemblance, 
but they still belonged rather to the language of books and 
of science than to the daily speech of common life. On the 
Fourth of July, 1826, the semi-centennial jubilee of the dec- 
laration of American Independence, Thomas Jefferson, the 
author, and John Adams, one of the signers of that remark- 
able manifesto, both also Ex-Presidents, died, and this con- 
currence in the decease of distinguished men on the anni- 
versary of so critical a point in their lives and the history of 
their country was noticed all over the world, but more es- 
pecially in the United States, as an extraordinary coincidence. 
The death of Mr. Monroe, also an Ex-President, on the Fourth 
of July a year or two after, gave a new impulse to the circu- 
lation of the word coincidence, and in this country, at least, 
it at once acquired, and still retains, a far more general cur- 
rency than it had ever possessed before.* 

The discussions at an important political assemblage,- a 
few years since, gave a wide circulation, if not birth, to a 
new word, the convenience of which will secure it a perma- 
nent place in the language, and, at last, admission to the 
vocabulary of at least American literature. At the Balti- 
more Convention of 18M, which nominated Mr. Polk for the 

* Words to which a sudden prominence is thus given are usually iterated 
and rc-iterated usque ad nauseam. Thus, element, perhaps from its frequency 
in alchemical books and conversation, or from its use in theological discussion 
in connection with the doctrine of the real presence, (elements of the Eucharist, 
a sense not noticed by Johnson,) had become so current, that the clown in 
Twelfth Night objects to it as too common. 

"I will conster to them whence you come: who you are, and what you 
would, are out of my welkin : I might say element ; but the word is O'er-wcrn.' 
—Twelfth Night, Act III. sc. 1. See App. 41. 
18 



274 INTRODUCTION OF NEW WORDS. 

Presidency, some excitement was produced by alleged at- 
tempts to control the action of the convention by persons not 
members of it, through irregular channels, and by irregular 
means. In the debate which arose on this subject, a prom- 
inent member -energetically protested against all interference 
with the business of the meeting by outsiders. The .word, if 
not absolutely new, was at least new to most of those who 
read the proceedings of that important convention, and it 
was now for the first time employed in a serious way. Its con- 
venience seemed to strike the public mind at once, and as we 
have no other, and can have no better word than this genuine 
Saxon compound to express the idea it conveys, it will un- 
doubtedly maintain itself in our vocabulary. 

Probably most of the new words in any language grow 
out of the foreign relations of the country where it is spoken, 
because new objects and new conditions of society are more 
frequently of foreign than of strictly domestic origin. The 
early history of the English language is full of exemplifica- 
tions of this principle, and many illustrations of its truth 
will be found in every treatise upon our native speech. Sim- 
ilar circumstances are producing like effects at the present 
day. The American word immigrant, for example, as op- 
posed to emigrant, the one used with reference to the country 
to which, the other with reference to that from which the 
migration takes place, is a valuable contribution of this sort 
to the English vocabulary. It did not originate in England, 
because, since the Conquest, there has never been any such 
influx of strangers into that country as to create a necessity 
for very specific designations of them ; but the immense 
number of Europeans who have migrated to the United 
States has given that class of inhabitants a great importance, 



INTRODUCTION OF NEW WORDS. 27o 

and very naturally suggested tie expediency of coining a 
precise term, to express their relations to their new country, 
corresponding to that we already possessed as applicable to 
their relations to their native land. Doubtless incomer would 
have been a better word, but that was objectionable, because 
it could not have a correlative of like formation, for out- 
comer would, in some of its uses, involve a contradiction, and 
besides, the noun income, to which incomer would regularly 
correspond, has a very different signification. Better still 
would it have been to revive the good old English comeling, 
which was used by Robert of Gloucester for the very same 
purpose as our immigrant, and often occurs in the Wycliffite 
translations, where later versions have stranger. 

From this same root we have another very expressive 
word, the boldness of whose form — a form that sets at defi- 
ance the ordinary rules of derivation — renders it still more 
appropriate as a designation of a class of independent think- 
ers, who pride themselves on their hostility to venerable 
shams and their disregard of hoary conventionalities. I 
mean the comeouters. This word has not, I believe, been yet 
received into polite literature, but nevertheless, repugnant as 
it is to the laws of English etymology, its thorough Saxon 
descent makes it more acceptable to both tongue and ear than 
such a word as enlightenment, which, as I have said before, 
though much wanted, has been hitherto resisted because of 
its mongrel aspect. 

A list of the new words which have been presented for 
admission to our vocabulary,* including those which have 

* Character, though occurring many times in Shakespeare, does not appear 
to have been very readily or generally accepted, for Wotton, writing at least 
ten years after Shakespeare's death, says: 

"Now here then will lie the whole businesse, to set down beforehand cer 



276 INTRODUCTION OF NEW WORDS. 

failed of securing a reception, would be botli curious and in« 
structive, because it would show the deliberate judgment, oi 
rather the instinctive sense, of the nation with respect to the 
principles which ought to govern the formation of native, and 
the naturalization of foreign, vocables. The tendency for a 
long time appears to have been to discourage domestic lin- 
guistic manufactures, and promote the importation of foreign 
wares. Here, as in public economy and finance, the free-trade 
party is in the ascendant, but in spite of the foreign influences 
to which the rapidly increasing intercourse, personal and 
commercial, between England and the European continent 
gives great weight, and in spite of the Latinizing tendencies 
of rhymed verse, to which I shall refer hereafter, there are 
unequivocal tokens of a reaction, and I have little doubt that 
the Saxon element will soon recover some of the ground it 
has abandoned in the last four or five centuries. Hitherto, 
however, not much has been done in the way of reviving lost 
or quiescent Saxon roots, and the fluctuations of the vocab- 
ulary have been chiefly confined to the Romance ingredient. 
Latin words, like strange guests, are constantly coming late 
and going early, while the native Saxons either steadily main- 
tain their position, like old householders, or if they once fall 
into forgetfulness, remain long in a state of repose ; but there 
is now a movement among the Seven Sleep ers, and the future 
progress of our speech, it may be hoped, will bring back to 
us many a verbal Kip Yan Winkle. 

I have elsewhere spoken of what I have called the " sus- 
pended animation " of words, as one of the most singular 



tain Signatures of Hopefulnesse, or Characters (as I will rather call them, be. 
cause that Word hath gotten already some entertainment among us)." Wotton, 
A Survcigh of Education, p. 321, edition of 1651. 



SUSPENDED ANIMATION OF WOEDS. 277 

phenomena of their history, and English philologists have 
collected numerous instances of this sort, chiefly from the 
Latin element of English, though there are not wanting like 
cases in proper Saxon words. The Saxon adjective reckless, 
formerly spelled retchless, for example, was in constant use 
down to the middle of the sixteenth century, but when 
Hooker, writing fifty years later, employed the word, it had 
become so nearly obsolete, that he, or perhaps his editor, 
thought it necessary to explain its meaning in a marginal 
note. It has now been revived, and is perfectly familiar 
to every English-speaking person.* A couple of like in- 
stances, though not in Saxon words, occur in a little vocabu- 
lary which went through at least twelve editions in the sev- 



* The indiscriminate use of bound, in the sense of ready, destined, deter- 
mined, which has recently become very common in this country, and is perhaps 
peculiar to it, is an instance of the revival of an obsolete employment, if not 
an obsolete signification of a word. In nautical language, indeed, as indicating 
the destination of a ship, it has been always in use, and is idiomatic and proper, 
but the present extension of its application is an oifensive vulgarism, and is 
further objectionable, because it is a confounding of words which have no rela- 
tion to each other. When we say a ship is bound to Cadiz, we are not employ- 
ing the past participle of the verb to bind, but the Old-Northern participial ad- 
jective btiinn, from the verb at bua, which signifies, among other things, to 
make ready or prepare. B6inn is of very frequent occurrence in Icelandic, 
and it is applied, without distinction, either to ships and their company, or to 
other objects and persons, as expressive of destination, or of purpose. It often 
corresponds to our familiar auxiliary, going, in such phrases as, 1 am going to 
do this or that. The Scandinavian inhabitants of the North of England intro- 
duced this word, and in the form bown or boun it has ever since remained in 
general use in the North-English and Scottish dialects ; but in English proper, 
it has long been confined to the nautical vocabulary, though sometimes figura- 
tively applied, in a strictly analogous sense, to persons. The modern corruption 
consists in employing it in a way that embraces the significations, both of the 
Old-Northern buinn and of the English participle bound from bind, and it is 
therefore a gross abuse of language. The nautical term wind-bound is literally 
bound or confined by adverse winds, and is not related to bound as denoting 
destination. The Anglo-Saxon had a verb buan, cognate with the Icelandic at 
bua, but I believe never used in this particular sense. Sec App. 42. 



278 SUSPENDED ANIMATION OF WOKDS. 

enteenth century, but is now so completely forgotten as to be 
little known except to bibliographers. It is entitled, The 
English Dictionarie, or an Interpreter of Hard English 
Words, Enabling as well Ladies and Gentlewomen, young 
Scholars, Clerks, Merchants, as also Strangers of any Nation 
to the understanding of the more difficult Authors alreadi 
Printed in our Language — By Henry Cockeram, Gentleman. 

Among the " hard words " which make up Master Cock- 
cram's list, are the verbs abate and abandon, both of which 
are marked as " now out of use, and only used of some an- 
cient writers." JSTow, both these words occur in the English 
Bible, Shakespeare, and in Milton, and abate, as a term of 
art in law, could never have become obsolete in the dialect 
of that profession. They are now, and have long been, in 
very current use, both colloquially and in literature, and the 
period during which they were not familiarly employed must 
have been a very short one.* 

The introduction of a new word, native or foreign, often 
proves fatal to an old one previously employed in the same 

* Ventilate and proclivity, after having been half-forgotten, have come again 
into brisk circulation, and a comparison of the literature of the seventeenth, 
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries will show multitudes of words common to 
the first and last of these periods, but which were little used in the second. 

The most remarkable lists of such words as I am now speaking of are those 
referred to by Trench in the second chapter of his little volume ou the author- 
ized version of the New Testament. I will not quote these lists here, because 
throughout this course, I make it a point not to borrow from that very instruc- 
tive and agreeable writer, and thereby diminish the pleasure which such of m> 
hearers as are not already familiar with his works will find in their perusal 
They are excellent exemplifications of the attractions and value of unpi'etending 
philological criticism, as distinguished from linguistic investigation ; and I know 
no books on language better calculated to excite curiosity and stimulate inquiry 
into the proper meaning and use of the English tongue, than those interesting 
volumes, The Study of Words, English Past and Present, The Lessons contained 
in Proverbs, and the essay on the English New Testament, to which I have just 
alluded. 



DIALECT OF PERIODICALS. 279 

or an allied sense. Income, for instance, is of recent intro- 
duction, though Saxon in its elements and form, and it is 
generally applied to the pecuniary product of estates, offices 
or occupations, and even when used with respect to lands, its 
signification is confined to the money received for rent, oj 
the net profit accruing from the sale of the crops. It corre 
sponds very closely to the German Einkommen in etymol- 
ogy, structure and signification, and is a good example of 
verbal affinity between a Teutonic dialect and our own, but 
we have purchased this convenient word by the sacrifice of 
another, equally expressive, though more restricted in use, 
and belonging to the Scandinavian side of English. I refer 
to of come, employed by old English writers in the sense of 
produce rather than of product, though sometimes synony- 
mously with the more modern income. 

To persons who desire to watch the progress of change in 
English, periodical literature, and especially the daily jour- 
nals, furnish the best opportunities for observation, and they 
are as faithful in serving up the novelties of speech, as the 
political and commercial news of the day. The advertising 
columns, especially, often contain very odd specimens of both 
syntax and vocabulary, and one can scarcely run over a sin- 
gle sheet of a city newspaper without noting, among words 
which merit a place nowhere, some which, though excluded 
from dictionaries, ought long ago to have met acceptance. 

In a small fragment of a New York daily paper, pub- 
lished within a month, I find these words and phrases, (near- 
ly half of them in extracts from English journals,) not any 
one of which I believe any general English dictionary ex- 
plains : photoglyphic engraving ; telegram, for telegraphic 
message ; an out-and-out extreme clipper / prospecting for 
gold; go-ahead people; they are not on speaking terms; 



2S0 DIALECT OF PERIODICALS. 

Mr. Gottschalk's rendition of a piece of music , the Black 
Swan is concertizing in the western States ; the vessel leaked 
so many strokes an hour / an emergent meeting of a society- • 
apparently in the sense of a meeting to consider an emer- 
gency ; such a man ought to be spotted by his associates ; old 
fogy, which by the way is an old English word ; such a 
handsomely-put-on man as Mr. Dickens ; and Kossuth's 
phrase, the solidarity of the peoples. Some of these expres- 
sions have little claim to be considered English, and they be- 
long to the class of words which " come like shadows, so 
depart," but several of them long have been, and others will 
be, permanent members of the colloquial, if not of the liter- 
ary fraternity of the language. Photoglyphie and telegram 
are too recent in origin to be yet entitled to the rights of 
citizenship, but whatever may become of the former, tele- 
gram will maintain its place, for reasons of obvious conven- 
ience ; and in spite of the objections of some Hellenists 
against it as an anomalous formation, the English ear is too 
familiar with Greek compounds of the same elements to find 
this word repugnant to our own principles of etymology. 



LECTURE XIII. 

INTERJECTIONS AND INTONATIONS. 

In a historical sketch of the genetic development of the 
parts of speech, we should naturally begin with the Interjec- 
tion, both because it is the earliest of distinct human vocal 
sounds, and because it is a spontaneous voice prompted by 
nature, and not, like other words, learned by imitation, or 
taught by formal instruction. This is at least the character 
of the true interjection, though the want of a specific term, 
aud the inconvenience which would result from a too copious 
and minute grammatical nomenclature, oblige us to include 
under the same appellation words, and even entire phrases, 
whose resemblance to that part of speech lies chiefly in be- 
ing, like it, introduced into a period with which they are not 
syntactically connected. 

Of the elements of discourse, there is no one which has 
received so little attention from grammarians as the part of 
speech in question. Few treatises on language devote more 
than a page or two to the subject, and many writers have 
denied to interjections the character of words altogether. I 
think that, with most grammarians, this is a prejudice arising 



282 INTEKJECTIONS NOT SYNTACTICAL. 

from the fact, that these words seem to have no appropriate 
place in so artificial a system as that of the Latin grammar, 
from which we have derived most of onr ideas of the struc- 
ture of language. They can neither be declined nor conju 
gated ; they are incapable of degrees of comparison ; they 
govern nothing, qualify nothing, connect nothing, and may 
be left out of the period altogether without affecting the syn- 
tactical propriety of its structure. In short, they cannot be 
parsed. They have no position in the rank and file of the 
legion, and therefore are at best supernumeraries, if not in- 
truders. In a language so cemented and compacted togethei 
as the Latin, not by mortar or pins of independent material 
and formation, but by organic attachments, natural hooks 
and eyes, congenital with the words and of one substance with 
them, this objection to the recognition of constituents so in- 
capable of assimilation is by no means without validity ; but 
in English, and in those other tongues where the relations 
between important words are determined by mere posit ion 
or by the aid of distinct and insignificant particles, it strikes 
us much less forcibly. I shall endeavor to vindicate the 
claim of these neglected articulations to rank as legitimate 
means of vocally expressing human passions, states, affec- 
tions, and therefore to be called words, though of a rhetorical 
and dramatic, not of a logical or didactic character. 

Considered as a purely natural and spontaneous emission 
of the voice, we might expect to find similar interjections in 
all human tongues, but their forms, even when they most re- 
semble each other, are modified by the same obscure influ- 
ences which diversify the action of the organs of speech in 
the production of like or analogous sounds among different 
nations, and consequently they are by no means identical in 
different languages. The alleged diversity in the cries of the 



DIFFERENCES OF PRONUNCIATION. 283 

infant, and in the true interjections, which two utterances, 
psychologically considered, belong to the same general class 
of expressive sounds, has been urged by some physiologists 
as a proof of a diversity of origin in the human race. Bu+ 
the argument loses something of its weight, when it is shown, 
as it may be, that in numerous other cases, words common to 
two or more demonstrably cognate nations, and identical ir 
form and sound, so far as any written notation can express 
sound, are nevertheless differenced in their pronunciation by 
those nations as widely as the true interjections are by unre- 
lated races. These distinctions are occasioned by two proxi- 
mate causes ; the one is the employment of different sets of 
muscles, by different peoples, for the production of the same 
or similar sounds, the other is the peculiar quality impressed 
upon articulate sounds by the intonation with which they 
are uttered. 

These two classes of linguistic facts, the production namely 
of like or analogous sounds in different languages by the em- 
ployment of different organs, or at least muscles, and the fixed 
character of national intonation in certain languages, have as 
yet been little investigated by philologists, but they are full 
of curious interest, and the study of them, however difficult, 
is essential to the construction of even a tolerably complete 
system of phonology. Nice distinctions between related 
sounds depend of course upon the mechanical means em- 
ployed to produce them, and one reason why an adult so 
seldom succeeds in mastering the pronunciation of a foreign 
language, why he is at once recognized as a stranger by his 
articulation even of words which, according to grammars and 
dictionaries, are identical with syllables and words of his 
mother-tongue, is, that to pronounce them like a native, he 
must call into play muscles not employed, or employed in a 



284 INTONATIONS. 

different way, in speaking his own language and which have 
become so rigid from disuse, that he cannot acquire the com- 
mand of them, or, in other words, render them what are called 
voluntary muscles. Further, the organs of speech act and 
react upon each other ; the frequent play of a given set of 
muscles modifies the action of neighboring or related mus- 
cles ; there is, to use a word, which, if not now English, soon 
will be, a certain solidarity between them all, and organs ac- 
customed to the deep gutturals of the Arabic, the hissing 
and lisping sounds of the English, or the nasals of the French 
and Portuguese, are with great difficulty trained to the pure 
articulation of languages like the Italian, in which such ele- 
ments do not exist. 

National peculiarities of intonation are still more subtle 
and obscure, and they are almost equally difficult to seize by 
the ear, and to reproduce by the lips and tongue. To us, 
whose intonations belong not to the individual word, but to 
the whole period, it is difficult to conceive of the tone with 
which a word is uttered, as a constant, essential, characteristic 
and expressive ingredient of the word itself. But in mono- 
syllabic languages like the Chinese, where the number of 
words, differing in the vowel and consonantal elements of 
which they are composed, must necessarily be very small, 
other distinctions must be resorted to, and accordingly we 
find that in such languages a monosyllable, consisting per- 
haps of one vowel and one or two consonantal elements, and 
which admits of but one mode of spelling in alphabetic char- 
acters, may nevertheless have a great number of meanings, 
each indicated by a peculiarity of intonation not perhaps ap- 
preciable by foreign ears, but nevertheless readily recogniza- 
ble by a native. These peculiarities are however by no 
means confined to languages so alien to our own, for they ex 



INTONATIONS. 285 

ist in the Danish and the Swedish, both of which are near- 
ly allied to English, and they, no donbt, occur to a consid 
erable, but thus far uninvestigated, extent, in other tonguea 
more familiar to most of us. In such languages, these into- 
nations are constant, and they are also expressive and signifi- 
cant, so far that certain words are nnder all circumstance? 
pronounced with the same intonation, and thus distinguished 
from words differing from them in signification, but other- 
wise identical in sound. Scandinavian phonologists have 
made these intonations, for which the vocabulary of our Ian 
guage does not even furnish names, a subject of special in- 
quiry ; and Rask, one of the most eminent of modern philol- 
ogists, has subtilized so far upon them, that few of his own 
countrymen, even, have sufficient acuteness of ear to follow 
him. But this is not strange, when we learn that the same 
discriminating phonologist fancied he could detect, what no 
Englishman or American ever did, a difference between the 
pronunciation of our two English words pale, pallid, and pail, 
a water-bucket.* 

Yet more etherial than even these subtle shades of differ- 
ence, is what, to borrow a musical term, may be called the 
mode in which a given language is spoken. A stranger in 
Greece or the East is struck at once by a certain sadness of 
tone, amounting at times almost to wailing, which marks the 
speech of the people, and especially of the women of the lower 
classes. Some travellers have ascribed this to the lon°: cen- 
turies of humiliation and oppression under which women 
have groaned in the East ; but I think it belongs rather to the 
races than to the sex ; for it is not altogether confined to the 
women : and, besides, something of the same sort is found 

* Rask's Danish Grammar for the use of Englishmen. 



286 INTONATIONS. 

among the most primitive and simple tribes, and the fact, if 
it is a fact, that the music of ancient Greece and Latium, like 
that of most Oriental countries, was wholly in the minor 
mode, seems to confirm this view. 

The Greek, or to speak more specifically, Alexandrian and 
other colonial grammarians, carefully investigated the into- 
nation of their language, in both its branches, accentuation, 
and vocal inflection, and they invented several points, which 
we call accents, to indicate the particular intonation of the 
important syllables of the words. What the signification of 
these points was we do not know ; nor does the pronunciation 
of the modern Greeks afford us any light on the subject. 
"What we call accent, that is, stress of voice, has been gen- 
erally supposed to have been, among other things, marked 
by them ; but this is disputed. Metrical quantity or prosody, 
they certainly did not indicate, but left it to general rules, 
which, in most cases, were sufficiently explicit. The quan- 
tity, or relative duration of syllables as it is generally under- 
stood, is a quality of sound to which the Greek ear was 
acutely sensible, and it appears to have been recognized in 
the earlier Teutonic dialects, but to modern ears, it is, as an 
element of prosody, much less appreciable. In English verse ; 
and more especially by recent poets, rhythm has been made 
to depend upon and consist in accentuation alone, and those 
other elements of articulation, which to the ancient classical 
nations constituted the very essence of poetical melody, are, 
by the fashion of the day, altogether disregarded. This, I 
think, is a mistake, but it will be more fitly considered on 
another occasion. 

But, to return from what may be considered a digression, 
the true interjections, though modified by peculiarities of in- 
tonation, have at least a family resemblance, if not an abso- 



SIMILARITY OF INTERJECTIONS. 287 

lute identity in most known languages. They are, for the 
greater part, monosyllabic, and frequently consist of a vowel 
preceded or followed by an aspirate, or aspirated guttural 
only, though they are not always of so simple a structure. 
Some linguists distinguish between interjections which aro 
bare indications of mental or physical pain or pleasure, and 
those which are expressive of sensuous impressions derived 
from external objects through the organs of sight and hear- 
ing ; but for our present purpose it is not essential to inquire 
how far this classification is well founded. The claim of in- 
terjections of the purely involuntary character to be classed 
among what grammarians call the parts of speech, has been 
disputed, as I have already remarked, on the ground of their 
alleged want of a truly articulate character, and especially 
of all etymological and syntactical connection with the peri- 
ods of discourse. It is for this reason that the name of in- 
terjection, from the Latin interjicio, I throw in, has been 
applied to them, as something casually dropped into the sen* 
tence, but not logically belonging to it, or having any gram- 
matical relations with it. It is said that such interjections be- 
long to speech, only in that figurative sense in which all the 
means whereby external facts are made known to us are com- 
prised within the term language, and they are assimilated to 
those inarticulate cries which constitute the language of the 
lower animals. They are generally spontaneous, involuntary 
exclamations, and they express, in a vague and indeterminate 
way, the simple fact that the utterer is painfully or pleasura- 
bly affected, without in themselves giving any indication of 
the cause, or even always of the specific character, of the 
emotion or sensation. The interjection has however one im- 
portant peculiarity, which not only vindicates its claim to be 
regarded as a constituent of language, but entitles it une- 



288 INTERJECTIONS PARTS OF SPEECH. 

quivocally to a high rank among the elements of discourse. 
It is in itself expressive and significant, though indeed in a 
low degree, whereas, at least in uninnected languages like the 
English, other words, detached from their grammatical con- 
nections, are meaningless, and become intelligible only as 
members of a period. If I ntter an interjectional exclama- 
tion denoting pain, joy, sorrow, surprise, or anger, every per- 
son who hears me understands at once that I am agitated by 
the corresponding affection. Here, then, a fact is communi- 
cated by a single syllable, and the interjection may be re- 
garded as the hieroglyphical or symbolical expression of a 
whole period. But, on the other hand, if I pronounce the 
word house, or red, or run, or ten, without other words, and 
without accompanying gestures or other explanatory circum- 
stances, I tell the listener nothing, though the word may, in- 
deed, from accident or from some obscure chain of association, 
excite in his mind an image of the object, or an intellectual 
conception of the act, or accident, or number, denoted by 
the word I use. He may, in short, suppose & subject, an ob- 
ject, a copula, or whatever predicate is necessary to complete 
the period, and thus arbitrarily or conjecturally supply the 
ellipsis. This, in fact, from the habit of individualizing the 
general, and making concrete the abstract, he can hardly fail 
to do, but nevertheless, in the absence of explanatory circum- 
stances, this mental operation of the auditor neither logically 
results from, nor is warranted by, the force of the word I 
have uttered, which of itself communicates no fact, author- 
izes no inference. And herein lies the great miracle of 
speech, the strongest proof of its living, organic — I had al- 
most said divine — power, that even as the processes of veg- 
etable life build up, assimilate, vivify, and transform into 
self-sustaining, growing, and fruitful forms the dead material 



INTERJECTIONS PARTS OF SPEECH. 289 

of mechanical nature, so language, by the mere collocation 
and ordormance of inexpressive articulate sounds, can inform 
hem with the spiritual philosophy of the Pauline epistles, 
the living thunder of a Demosthenes, or the material pictur- 
esqueness of a Russell. 

The interjections hitherto described are distinguished from 
the other parts of speech, not only by their inherent and in- 
dependent expressiveness, (a point in which they have a cer- 
tain analogy with words imitative of natural sounds, and 
therefore significant of them,) but by the fact that they are 
subjectively connected with the passion or sensation they de- 
note, and are not so much the enunciation or utterance of the 
emotion, as symptoms and evidences of it ; in fact, a mode of 
thinking aloud. In the other articulate forms of communi- 
cation by which we make known our mental or bodily state, 
that state becomes objective, and therefore those forms are 
descriptive, not expressive. Accordingly, the interjection 
may be said to be the appropriate language, the mother- 
tongue of passion ; and hence much of the effect of good 
acting depends on the proper introduction and right articula- 
tion of this element of speech. It is related of Whitfield, 
that his interjections, his Ah ! of pity for the unrepentant 
sinner, his Oh ! of encouragement and persuasion for the 
almost converted listener, formed one of the great excellen- 
ces of his oratory, and constituted a most effective engine in 
his pulpit artillery. 

There is a species of interjection not usually distinguished 
by English grammarians from other words of that class, 
but which some German writers expressively call Lautge- 
b e r d e n , or vocal-gestures. These approach much more nearly 
to the character of other words than those of which we have 

hitherto spoken. The spontaneous interjections constitute a 
19 



290 VOCAL GESTURES. 

kind of self-communion, and though conveying information 
of a certain sort to others, they are not uttered with any such 
consci )us purpose. The Lautgeberde, on the other 
hand, is not a mere mvoluntary expression of sensation or 
emotion, but is addressed to other persons or creatures, and 
usually indicates a desire or command, so that it corresponds 
to the imperative of verbs in complete periods. Among 
these Lautgeberde n, are all the isolated, monosyllabic 
or longer words, by wdiich we invite or repel the approach, 
and check or encourage the efforts of others ; in short, all sin- 
gle detached articulations, intended to influence the action, or 
call the attention, of others, but not syntactically connected 
with a period. Analogous to these are certain passionate ex- 
pressions, sometimes forming whole periods, but more com- 
monly abridged, and used interjectionally. They are some- 
times reduced to a single word, sometimes composed of sev- 
eral, but usually without any grammatical connection with 
what precedes or follows them. In this class are embraced 
most familiar optative and deprecatory forms of expression, 
and especially the invocation of blessings and denunciation 
of curses. Farewell, and welcome, (originally distinct periods, 
but now interjection al,) Heaven forbid, and other similar 
ejaculations, are of this character. The Greek, especially in 
passionate declamation, is full of such phrases. Those famil- 
iar with Demosthenes will remember a striking instance in 
the Fourth Philippic, where, in an interjectional form, he 
invokes the vengeance of the gods on Philip of Macedon. 
This is a peculiarly interesting example, because it is one of 
the few where a syntactical relation exists between the ejac- 
ulation and the period into which it is introduced ; for the 
execration, oiirep avrbv igoXeaeiav \ begins with a relative 
pronoun, which grammatically connects it with the preceding 



INTERJECTIONS SOMETIMES SYNTACTICAL. 291 

denunciation of Philip, as an enemy to Athens and her 
gods. 

It is affirmed that in the Euscara or Basque, the interjec- 
tions are regularly declinable, and it would hence appear 
that their want of syntactical character in the Indo-European 
languages is not an essential feature of this part of speech. 

Allied in form and nature to the true interjection, but 
wholly distinct from the constant intonations belonging to 
particular words in certain languages, to which I have al- 
ready alluded, are the modulations of the voice in articulate 
speech, which, as constituting a characteristic difference be- 
tween the breathing, spoken word, and its silent written rep- 
resentative, between the subjective and the objective elements 
of language, between living action and historical narration, are 
among the most powerful instrumentalities whereby man acts 
on the moral nature of his fellow-man. The unstudied ac- 
cents of young children are prompted by nature. They are 
more truly spontaneous, and not less expressive, than the 
notes of the forest song-bird, and they are the most touching 
and persuasive of human utterances. But with the sincerity 
and frankness of lisping childhood, passes away the truthful- 
ness of its tones. Dissimulation, hypocrisy and the thou- 
sand forms of social falsehood, almost extirpate the heaven- 
born faculty of significant modulation, and the voice soon 
becomes as artificial as the gait, the gestures, and the other 
outward habits of the man. Affectation, the desire of seem- 
ing to be that which we are not, is the besetting sin of men. 
A plain, simple, unaffected manner in speech, in gesture, in 
carriage, as it is one of the most attractive of external qual- 
ities, so it is one of the most difficult of acquirements ; for in 
all grades of society, from the wigwam to the saloon, the 
most natural thing in the world is to be unnatural. 



292 MODULATIONS OF VOICE. 

But besides this half-voluntary distortion £ our natura. 
faculty of speech, the injudicious methods "by which reading 
is taught do very much to fix, as well as to originate, a for- 
mal, monotonous and unnatural intonation. The habit of 
mechanical inexpressive delivery, once contracted, is almost 
incurable ; and it is a trite observation that so simple a thing 
as a clear, appropriate and properly intoned and emphasized 
pronunciation, in reading aloud, is one of the rarest as well 
as most desirable of social accomplishments. Few persons 
are able, when the eye is fixed upon a printed or written 
page, or even in reciting what they have learned by heart, to 
modulate the voice, as they would do in the unpremeditated 
conversational utterance of their own thoughts in the same 
words ; and the difference between our modes of reading and 
speaking is not confined to the modulation of the period, but 
extends itself to single words, so that it is extremely common, 
especially among persons not much practised in reading 
aloud, to use one system of orthoepy in conversation, and 
quite another in reading. But the evil habits we contract in 
our school exercises are productive of further mischief. They 
are highly injurious to the physical organs of speech. And 
this is one reason why clergymen, who, in the religious ser- 
vices of most sects, read much aloud, are so much more fre- 
quently annoyed with bronchial affections, than lawyers and 
political orators, who use the voice much more, and with 
louder and more impassioned articulation, but who for the 
most part speak extemporaneously, and with a more natural 
delivery. 

As has been already observed, the classes of words and 
of vocal modulations which we have been considering belong 
to, if they do not constitute, the language of passion, and 
therefore it is, as we have already hinted, equally a rule ot 



EXPLETIVES. 293 

morality and good taste to practise great caution and circum- 
spection in the employment of them. 

What are called expletives in rhetorical treatises are gram- 
matically allied to the interjections, though widely differ- 
enced from them by the want of meaning, which the inter- 
jection is never without. I can hardly agree with "Webster 
in his definition of the expletive, and still less in the state- 
ment with which he concludes it. " The expletive," says 
Webster, " is a word or syllable not necessary to the sense, 
but inserted to fill a vacancy or for ornament. The Greek 
language abounds with expletives." So far as the word 
answers no other purpose than to " fill a vacancy," it is prop- 
erly expletive, but if it be appropriate and graceful enough 
to deserve the name of an " ornament," it is not superfluous, 
and therefore is not an expletive. In most cases, indeed, the 
vacancy filled by words of this class is not merely a defect 
of continuity in the syntax, but it indicates a positive want 
of thought, and ignorant and illogical persons are naturally 
very prone to interlard their discourse with these fragmen- 
tary expressions. The frequent use of interjections, exple- 
tives and vague or unmeaning phrases of all kinds, is there- 
fore inadmissible, in a really elegant and graceful conversa- 
tional style ; and though I hope the caution is superfluous, I 
should not do justice to my subject, were I to omit to express 
my full concurrence in the condemnation which, for intellec- 
tual as well as social and moral reasons alike, persons of cul- 
ture award to the employment of profane language ; a vice 
eminently ungraceful in itself, and vulgarizing in its influ- 
ence. " Othes," says King James, " are but a use, and a 
sinne clothed with no delight nor gaine, and therefore the 
more inexcusable in the sight of men." 
13 



294 EXPLETIVES. 

Tlie remark with which Webster accompanies his defini- 
tion of the word expletive, namely, that the Greek language 
abounds in such, is in my opinion as erroneous as the defini- 
tion is defective. The Greeks, like the modern Italians, 
were an exceedingly excitable and impressible people, and 
Like them, they used a great number of interjections. We 
certainly are far from being able to discover the precise force 
of these ; still less can we find equivalents for them in a lan- 
guage which, like ours, is spoken by a graver and more re- 
served people, and therefore possesses fewer words of this 
class ; but with regard to the numerous particles and other 
words which Webster apparently classes among expletives, 
we are not authorized to infer that they were superfluous to 
the sense of the passages where they occur, barely because we 
do not see the necessity of them. The supposition is contrary 
to all we know of the habits of the Greek mind, and it is 
much safer to presume that they had a meaning and a force, 
which our imperfect knowledge of the niceties of the language 
forbids us to appreciate, than to believe that Plato, and Aris- 
totle, and Xenophon thought so inconsecutively as to be 
obliged to fill the interstices of their mental structures with 
insignificant rubbish. 

In commencing the study of foreign languages, we meet, 
with many words, to which dictionaries assign no distinct 
meaning, and which appear superfluous to the sense of the 
period, and therefore to be expletives. But further study gen- 
erally shows us that they, however difficult to define in them- 
selves, have, nevertheless, an important influence on the sense 
of the period, by strengthening, moderating, or otherwise 
qualifying, the signification of leading words. The German, 
as well as the Greek, is rich in these particles, and the exist- 
ence of the German as a living speech enables foreigners to 



EXPLETIVES. 295 

acquire a much clearer comprehension of these, at first sight 
insignificant, elements than is possible in the case of a lan- 
guage, which, like the Greek, survives only as a written 
tongue. 

The Greek and Latin languages are remarkably distin- 
guished from each other in the number and the character of 
the interjections ; and it will in general be found that the use 
and signification of the interjections employed in any lan- 
guage furnishes a very tolerable key to the character of the 
people who speak it. The modern Italians have inherited 
from their Roman ancestors a great number of elliptical pas- 
sionate phrases, which are employed in this way, and the 
frequent introduction of the names of the heathen deities, 
together with those of the Yirgin Mary and the saints, in 
their ejaculatory exclamations, produces a ludicrous effect upon 
a stranger. One of these has even found its way into Ger- 
man and English. In the comedies and other light literature 
of both, in the last century, it is of frequent occurrence, and 
if we can judge from them, it was very current in fashiona- 
ble society, though probably few of the fine ladies, who so 
often exclaimed, O, gemini ! (jiminy or jemini,) knew that 
the phrase was a Latin invocation of the divine brothers, 
Castor and Pollux.* 

* The Italian d i a m i n e ! is a different word, in diaboli nomine! 



LECTURE XIV. 

THE NOUN, ADJECTIVE AND VERB. 

It is not disputed, that in the genesis of language the in- 
terjection, even if not technically a part of speech, and the 
onomatopoetic or imitative words, must be regarded as the 
primary linguistic utterances, but grammatical physiologists 
differ much with respect to the order of succession in the 
other principal parts of speech. Presented in the usual form 
of a historical problem, the inquiry is an idle one, for the 
noun, whether substantive or adjective, and the verb, can be 
conceived of as existing only as members of a period or prop- 
osition, and therefore the noun supposes the verb, and the 
verb the noun. With the exception of the Lautgeberden, 
or vocal-gestures, and the imitative sounds, words are as es- 
sentially and necessarily social as man himself, and a single 
word can no more spring into spontaneous life, or exist in 
isolation, than can the intelligent being who uses it. We 
know external objects only by their sensuous properties and 
their action, and we must necessarily suppose all names of 
objects to have been primarily descriptive, because we can 
imagine no possible ground of a name, but the ascription of 
a quality or an act as characteristic of the object named. It 



HISTORICAL SUCCESSION OF WORDS. 297 

would seem, then, that before the name could be applied, the 
adjective or the verb expressive of the quality or act, the 
predicate, in short, must exist ; and on the other hand, as con- 
crete ideas must precede abstract ones, we cannot compre- 
hend the origin of the adjective or the verb, independently 
of the noun, or name of some object possessing the quality, 
or habitually practising the act, predicated by the adjec- 
tive or verb. But though words have no separate indi- 
vidual existence, though they live and move only in inter- 
dependence upon each other, yet in studying their forms and 
organization, each must be primarily investigated by itself, 
because the limited nature of our faculties, whether sensuous 
or intellectual, obliges us to acquire the knowledge of the 
whole by the successive study of its parts, of the complex, 
through an acquaintance with the simple elements of which 
it is conceived to be composed. 

In order to comprehend the physiology of a given lan- 
guage, or the functions and relations of its organs, a knowl- 
edge of its anatomy, or the normal structure of these or- 
gans, is necessary, and we will therefore examine briefly the 
formal characteristics of English words. These we have al- 
ready considered in their bearing upon etymology, and though 
we are now to look at them from a different point of view, 
the facts are still the same, and I must accordingly be par- 
doned for some repetition of what, indeed, I by no means 
suppose to have been new when I first presented it. I do 
not propose in the present course to attempt a formal exami- 
nation of every class of vocables into which grammarians 
have divided language, and I shall only discuss the character 
and offices of the noun or substantive, the adjective and the 
verb. I begin with the noun or substantive, not as histori- 
cally first, or logically pre-eminent, but because, in learning 



298 GRAMMATICAL NOMENCLATURE. 

words by the process of domestic instruction called the natu 
ral method, we commence with names. 

Before proceeding further, it will not be amiss to suggest 
an observation or two upon the names which grammarians 
have given to these parts of speech. The word noun is de- 
rived from the Latin n o m e n , a name, and is a very appropri- 
ate designation for the substantive, which is properly the 
name of an object. English grammarians generally include 
under the noun the adjective ', and speak of nouns substantive 
and nouns adjective. The ground of this nomenclature is 
the theory, that the adjective is to be regarded as the name 
of an accident or quality existing not independently or ab- 
stractly, but only in the concrete, and that the term which 
designates an accident is not properly entitled to a separate 
grammatical position, but must be considered as a mere ap- 
pendage or adjunct of the substantive. But this view is 
without any solid foundation. The verb is as truly the name 
of the act or status it represents, as the adjective of the qual- 
ity it expresses, and there would be the same propriety in 
styling the former the noun verbal, as the latter the noun 
adjective. The designations noun substantive and noun ad- 
jective, even if logically accurate, are moreover objectionable 
for grammatical purposes, as being awkward and unwieldy. 
I therefore discard them, and though I may occasionally em- 
ploy substantive, to vary the phrase, yet I shall generally 
use noun as equivalent to noun substantive, and not as em- 
bracing the adjective, which I consider as included in it only 
by a misnomer. 

The Roman grammarians applied to the member of the 
proposition which predicates of a subject being, state, volition, 
action or perception, the name of v e r b u m , or the word, as 
emphatically the most important vocable in the period, or 



GRAMMATICAL NOMENCLATURE. 299 

as the word which asserts, and in a sense embodies the 
proposition ; and the term verb, commonly employed in 
most European languages, like other technical words of 
modern grammar, is derived from the Latin appellation. 
German philologists, however, commonly style the verb 
Zeitwort, time-word, because the verb, by its form, or 
by the aid of auxiliaries, generally expresses the period of 
the act or status described, as past, present or future, and of 
course involves the notion of time. But this nomenclature 
appears to me highly objectionable. 

Whenever we describe or name an object by a quality 
either unessential, or relatively unimportant, to our concep- 
tion of its true character, we utter a philological untruth, and 
proclaim a philosophical error. We can as easily abstract 
the notion of an act or a condition from time, as we can that 
of color, or any other sensuous quality. We can as well im- 
agine the act of running, or striking, without any reference 
to the period when the act takes place, as we can the proper- 
ty of redness, of weight, of sourness or sweetness, and there- 
fore, although the variable forms of verbs usually express 
time, yet to the primary notion conveyed by the verb, time 
is as unessential as it is to our conception of the taste of an 
orange. We may go further, and affirm that in strictness all 
verbs express present time, when they refer to time at all. 
In the process of ratiocination, we think by general terms 
alone, without reference to time, but it is certain that when 
we individualize an act or state, the image which it suggests 
is necessarily a present one. Whether I say, " Mr. Church 
painted his Heart of the Andes last year," or " Mr. Church 
will paint the Jungfrau next year," the picture and the 
painter are not past or future to my imagination, but present ; 
and therefore the verb I use excites in both my mind and 



300 VERB NOT TIME-WORD. 

that of my hearer a notion of a present artist and a present 
act. The imagination lives in a perpetual now. The notion 
of an individual event as having been, or as yet to be, is a 
purely logical conception, and only general propositions 
which exist in words alone, only that which we cannot pic- 
ture to ourselves, that which has no specific reality, but is a 
mere intellectual figment, can be detached from the notion 
of present time at all. In most languages, verbs have forms 
which exclude the notion of time, as, for example, the infini- 
tive as used in modern English; and even the forms gram- 
matically expressive of time are, in general propositions, em- 
ployed aoristically, or without any reference to time. For 
example, when I say, " birds fly," I do not affirm that birds 
are now flying, that they actually did fly, or will fly, at any 
past or future point of time, but simply that the power of 
flight is at all times an attribute of the bird. The present 
tense of the verb to fly, as thus used, is as absolutely inde- 
pendent of time as the noun bird, or the adjective red, by 
which I may qualify it. If the expression of time is an in- 
herent necessity of the verb, special forms for the future as 
well as the present and the past ought to be universal, but in 
most modern European languages, the future is a compound, 
the elements of which are a present auxiliary and an aorist 
infinitive, for in the phrases I shall go, he will go, shall and 
will are in the present tense, and go is aoristic. The Anglo- 
Saxon, with a single exception in the case of a substantive 
verb, had absolutely no mode of expressing the future by any 
verbal form, simple or compound. The context alone deter- 
mined the time, and in German, in the Scandinavian dialects, 
and in English, we still very commonly, as the Anglo-Saxons 
did, express the future by a present. Ich gehe morgen 
nach Phil adelp hie, I go, or I am going, to Philadel- 



VERB NOT TIME-WORD. 301 

phia to -morrow, are more frequently used by Germans and Eng< 
lishmen than ichwerde g e h e n , I shall or will go ; and the 
adverbial nouns m org en and to-morrow, not the verbs ge- 
h e n and go, are the true time-words. The use of the present 
for the past, too, especially in spirited narrative and in poetry, 
is not less familiar, and in both these cases the expression of 
time belongs to the grammatical period, not to the verb. 

The missionary Bowen, whose grammar and dictionary 
of the Yoruba language are about to be published by the 
Smithsonian Institution, informs us that in that tongue the 
verbs have no inflections whatever for mood, tense, number 
or person, and that all logical and grammatical relations of 
the verb are expressed by particles and auxiliaries. To call 
the verb the time-word is therefore to name it by an accident, 
not by an essential characteristic ; by an occasional, not a uni- 
versal property. In fact, nearly the whole modern German 
scientific terminology is objectionable for similar reasons, and, 
as I have before attempted to show, also on higher philo- 
sophical grounds. The simple word verb is preferable to any 
other designation, not because, when we study its etymology, 
we find it truly descriptive, as indicating the relative impor- 
tance of this word in the period, but precisely for the oppo- 
site reason, namely, that to English ears it is not descriptive 
at all, but purely arbitrary, and therefore is susceptible of 
exact definition, and not by its very form suggestive of in- 
congruous images or mistaken theory. 

The simplest, and for the purposes of the present course, 
the best definition of the noun is that it is the name of a per- 
son, place or thing, of that, in short, which maybe an object 
of thought, whether as a sensuous perception, or as an intel- 
lectual conception, or in other words, that which may be the 
subject of a proposition. 



302 GRAMMATICAL NOMENCLATURE. 

Grammarians and logicians divide nouns into a great 
number of classes, but we shall find it sufficient for our ob- 
ject to regard only the most general division, which is that 
into proper nouns, or names of individual persons, places or 
things, as Cicero, New York, Great Eastern ; and convmon 
nouns, which are applied to whole species, genera, classes, as 
man, city, ship. 

The resemblance between the noun, as an English part 
of speech, and the noun of other languages, is closer than 
that between the verb or even the adjective and their foreign 
representatives. They have usually the distinction of number, 
one inflection of case, the genitive or possessive, and some of 
them even genders, so that all the formal characteristics of 
this class of words are more or less fully exemplified in 
English grammar, nor are they distinguished by any pecu- 
liarities of syntactical or logical character. 

Whatever of special interest, therefore, attaches to the 
English noun, must depend upon its etymological character, 
or the extent to which it may be derived from, or converted 
into, other parts of speech, the changes of signification 
which particular nouns undergo, and the number of distinct 
objects to which our language has given appropriate names. 
The very important question of the relation between the sig- 
nification of nouns, and the moral and intellectual character 
of those who employ them, has been already touched upon, 
and its more full consideration belongs elsewhere. First, 
then, of nouns as originative or derivative, as etymological 
material, or etymological product. There are languages in 
which almost all words may interchangeably assume every 
syntactical and logical relation, and each root in its turn run 
through all the grammatical categories. Of all the improve- 
ments which could be devised for speech, if speech were sus- 



NOUNS AS ETYMOLOGICAL MATERIAL. 303 

ceptible of artificial amelioration, this would be one of the 
most convenient. Our word hand may serve as an example 
of this ; we have from this root the verb to hand, to deliver 
by hand, and as Milton nses it, to join hands ; the verb han- 
dle, to use or hold with the hand, to manipulate, and, fig- 
uratively, to treat of or discuss ; the adjectives handleable, that 
which may be handled, /landless, without hands, handy, skil- 
ful, ingenious, convenient, or what is still better expressed 
by the Latin dexterous, to which the etymological correlative 
would be righthandy ; the adverb handily, skilfully; the 
secondary noun handle, that by which a thing is lifted, and, 
more remotely, the adjective handsome, and adverb hand- 
somely, which, however, are of doubtful etymology, and used 
in a sense very divergent from that of the supposed root. 
Besides these derivatives, we have numerous compounds into 
which hand enters, but these do not belong to the subject we 
are at this moment pursuing. The power of thus varying the 
noun is a real advantage which modern English has, or (for 
at present we make much less use of it than formerly) had 
over the Anglo-Saxon. In the struggle between Norman 
French and Anglo-Saxon after the Conquest, the native dia- 
lect of England was, for a time, subdued, and undoubtedly 
in real danger of extermination. When at length it revived, 
it was with much loss of its pristine power. Its inflections 
were gone, and its facility of composition very much re- 
stricted. These it strove in vain to regain, but in its efforts 
it struck out a new path of improvement, and but for the in- 
fluence of classical literature, which printing made predom- 
inant, and the consequent introduction of numerous Latin 
words and forms, that path would have been pursued to very 



304 NOUNS IN ETYMOLOGY. 

important -results.* The Anglo-Saxon was rather synthetical 
than analytical in its tendencies, and adopted new combina- 
tions and compositions with great ease, bnt lent itself less 
readily to derivative changes. Hence, thongh there are, I 
think, not less than a hundred Saxon componnds into which 
the noun hand enters, yet the only true derivatives I find 
are handlian and handle, whereas we have made Hve 
or six new English uncompounded words from this one root. 
At present, the movement is quite in the contrary direction, 
and we incline in more ways than one to borrow from foreign 
sources rather than to grow from our own germs, and manu- 
facture from our own material. The verbalization, if I may 
so express it, of a noun, is now a difficult matter, and we 
shrink from the employment even of well- authorized old 
nominal verbs. It is to old English that we owe our verbs 
to man, to house, to horse, to wood and to water, to game, to 
saddle and bridle, to shield, to sail, to fine, and Sylvester 
even goes the length of forming a verb from the generic 
name of a divinity : 

Some, Godding Fortune, idol of ambition ; 

godding being used for deifying. To dishearten maintains 
its ground, but the place of its converse to hearten is gen- 
erally supplied by the much inferior French verb to encour- 
age, though some eminent writers have lately revived our ex- 
cellent old word, and at least the participial adjective heart* 
ened may be considered as re-established.*!- 



* See Lecture XVIII. 

f Foreigners and children often seize on the primitive analogies of language, 
and by an unconscious generalization employ forms of expression, which, though 
so nearly obsolete as to strike us as unEnglish, are nevertheless strictly idioma- 
tic. Hence they constantly employ nouns for verbs, and few Americans have 



ANGLO-SAXON NOUNS. 305 

Yerbs of this class are generally from Saxon roots. For 
the most part they refer to sensuous objects or material oper- 
ations, and they are uniformly characterized by great direct- 
ness and force of expression. "We have, in some few cases, 
applied this process to nouns of foreign origin, as, for exam- 
ple, to station and to post a sentry, to provision a fortress, to 
preface an address, and Milton has " to syllable men's names ; " 
but such cases are not frequent. 

The Anglo-Saxon nouns had a large number of charac- 
teristic endings, by which they were distinguished from other 
parts of speech. Some of these probably were mere dialec- 
tic differences, but they were, no doubt, all originally sig- 
nificant of gender, quality, action, or state, though there are 
many of them to which no distinct force can now be as- 
signed, even in the earliest forms in which the language has 
come down to us. In modern English these endings have, 
in great part, been dropped or transformed, or have lost their 
significance, and are no longer distinguishable as expressive 
elements of the noun. Some of them, however, are in active, 
though constantly diminishing use, and still retain their orig- 
inal power. Such is the syllable -er, which we add to the 
infinitive of verbs, and thus form verbal nouns signifying the 
agent or subject of the verb from which it is derived. Thus 
a rmmer is he who runs, a writer he who writes. This end- 
ing, with more or less difference of orthography, is common 
to all the Scandinavian, Teutonic, and Romance tongues, and 

travelled in Europe without being asked by Continental servants ambitious ol 
displaying their English, "Did you bell?" for " did you ring? 1 ' Children wil 
say "it winds," for "it blows," and in this instance they create, not revive, a 
Saxon verb, for neither the Anglo-Saxon nor the Scandinavian languages possess 
& verb correlative to the noun wind, and corresponding to the Moeso-Gothic 
V a i a n and the German w e h e n . See Appendix, 43 and 44. 

20 



306 ENDING IN -ER 

the convenience, not to say the necessity, of such a form will 
probably keep it alive in all of them, in spite of the general 
effort of modern languages to free themselves from grammat- 
ical characteristics. The fact that it exists in all the sources 
from which our general vocabulary is drawn, commends it 
to us as an essential element of speech, and we apply it indis- 
criminately to verbal roots from whatever origin derived. 
Although I am much averse to orthographical novelties, yet 
I admit there is force in the arguments which have been 
urged for the spelling -er in preference to -or, even in words 
of Latin etymology, and I think we should gain both in 
uniformity and in expressiveness by the general adoption of 
the Saxon form. 

This termination was originally masculine exclusively, the 
corresponding Anglo-Saxon feminine termination being - s t r e , 
as seamestre, still extant in the form seamster or sem/pster. 
I find no positive evidence to show that the termination -ster 
was ever regarded as a feminine ending in English,* and I 

* In Piers Ploughman, v. 434-7, we have this passage : 

Buksteres and brewesfem 
And bochiers manye ; 
Wollen webbesters 
And weveres of lynnen. 

There is nothing in the context which would authorize the inference that tha 
ending in these words is indicative of sex, but at verse 2901-2, we read, 

My wif was a webbe 
And wollen cloth made : 

which gives some countenance to the supposition that the weaving of woollen* 
was a feminine occupation, and therefore that webster meant a female weaver. 

Brewesters and bakster.s occur at verse 1514 of the same poem, but there is 
nothing in the period to indicate the sex, and the same remark applies to spyn- 
uesteres in verse 2008, and wafresfore in verse 3772. WaiWr is applied to a 



ENDING IN -STEK. 307 

believe spinster is the only remaining word of this formation 
which is confined to the female sex. But here, the significa- 
tion in which the word is now alone used, that of an unmar- 
ried woman, determines the gender, and the ending has no 
grammatical force. Besides the general tendency of English 
to the rejection of distinctive forms, there was, in this case, a 
special reason for discarding an ending, which the introduc- 
tion of so many foreign words with the same terminal sylla- 
ble had made too ambiguous to serve any longer its original 
purpose. The number of English words in -ster, taken di- 
rectly from foreign languages, or formed from roots ending 
in -st, is not less than one hundred, and most of these are 
either masculine or incapable of gender, while of Saxon 
words originally feminine with this ending, I believe that 
semper, songster and spinster are the only ones still extant. 
Songster and sempster may be of either gender, although 
they are no doubt derivatives of the Saxon feminines sang- 
istre and seamestre, and not, as Webster strangely sup- 



male seller of wafers in verse 8478, but regrater to an occupation exercised by a 
woman, in verse 2923. 

Rose the regratar 

Was hire righte name. 

Halliwell says baJcester is used in Derbyshire for a female baker, and he sup- 
poses both bakcster and brewster to be feminine in the passages cited from Piers 
Ploughman, but certainly without internal evidence. He also gives sewster as a 
feminine noun in the Somersetshire dialect, and cites the Promptorium Par- 
vulorum to the same purpose. 

Worcester's new Dictionary refers to Ben Jonson as authority for the femi* 
nine gender of the same word, but the volume of the Promptorium containing 
the letter S is not yet reprinted, and I am unable to verily the citation from 
Jonson. Dyvynistre is used by Chaucer in the Knightes Tale, v. 2813, and as it 
is applied to the narrator of the tale, it was certainly masculine. Family names 
are usually, if not always, derived from the male ancestor, and Baxter, (bakester,) 
Brewster, and Webster, were therefore probably used as masculines at a very 
early period. See Appendix, 45. 



308 ENDINGS OF NOUNS 

poses, formed from the radical, and the root of the verb to 
steer. ,* The fact that the termination -ess has been applied 
to both these words, to make them feminine, shows that the 
ending -ster was not considered as indicative of gender. It 
is not nsed as a feminine sign in Layamon, in the Ormnlnm, 
or, as I believe, in Robert of Gloncester. We may there- 
fore conclude that it is not to be regarded as having ever 
had any specific force in English grammar. 

The feminine ending -ess is an indirect derivative of the 
Latin termination -ix, bnt it has never been very freely used 
in English, and has been applied to few native radicals. In- 
deed, it has been dropped from many alien words to which 
it was formerly attached, f 

We still possess and employ, though with reluctance, the 
diminutive ending in -ling, as in gosling, nestling, nursling, 
in which last word the root is Romance, but the coincidence 
of this termination with that of the modern form of the active 
participle, and the number of verbal nouns derived from roots 
ending in -le, have nearly deprived it of its significance, and 
the Norman diminutive in -et has gradually supplanted it, 
even in words of Saxon origin. The endings in -dom, -hood 
and -ship are still employed, but with constantly diminishing 
frequency, and the termination in -ness, indicative of quality, 
and that in -er, of action, are the only Saxon finals which 
can be said to have fairly maintained their ground. The 
former of these, as well as the latter, we have applied to 
French and Latin roots without any feeling of incongruity, 



* Webster's Dictionary, under songster. 

f Spousesse, cosinesse, and synneresse, occur in Wycliffe's New Testament, and 
tainted in Bishop Fisher's works. Fuller, Comment on Ruth, p. 104, has she& 
mint. 



ENDINGS OF NOUNS. 309 

Dut the present course of the language is adverse to the for- 
mation of new words of this class, and of the fifteen hundred 
nouns ending in -ness contained in Walker's rhyming Dic- 
tionary, a very large number are already obsolete, if indeed 
ever authorized. 

The place of the obsolete and obsolescent Saxon nominal 
terminations has been in part supplied by Latin and French 
endings in -ty, -ion, -uole, -ure, -ess, -ice, and -went, but there 
is very generally a reluctance to adapt these to Saxon roots, 
which much restricts the formation of nouns from other 
words. Betterment, much used by the best writers of the 
seventeenth century in the sense of improvement, growing or 
making better, either in a moral or a physical sense, has near- 
ly gone out of use, and is hardly employed, except as a tech- 
nical term in the jurisprudence of some of our States. Spen- 
ser's unruliment does not appear to have been much em- 
ployed by other writers, if indeed not altogether peculiar to 
himself." In the case of enlistment, we feel no such reluc 
tance, and the reason is, that though we have the word list 
in Anglo-Saxon, in the sense of a border, yet list, a roll, 
whence our verb to enlist, is probably French, and we read- 
ily adjoin a French nominal ending to a verb of French ety- 
mology. We have more than three hundred English verbal 
nouns with the ending -ment, of which only fifteen or twenty 
are from Saxon roots, and the proportion of native nouns 
with other foreign endings is scarcely larger. Were all these 
Latin and French terminations as readily applicable to Saxon 
roots as are the Saxon endings to foreign radicals, we could 



* Regal or regul, a rule, occurs in Anglo-Saxon, as well as in most of the 
Gothic dialects, and therefore is no stranger to English ears, but whether it is 
a native or a borrowed word is a matter of a good deal of doubt. 



310 ENGLISH PBEFIXES. 

hardly be said to have suffered a loss by the exchange of ono 
class for the other, inasmuch as the Gothic characteristic is 
not essentially more expressive than the Koman, but with 
respect to the prefixes applied to nouns the case seems to me 
otherwise. For instance, our inseparable prefixes mis and 
joa/n,) which, until the invention of printing familiarized the 
English mind and ear with the prefixes of the classical lan- 
guages, were applied to the noun and the adjective, as well 
as to the verb, had greater force of expression than any of 
the particles which have been introduced to supply their 
place. The negative or privative un-, was also formerly 
freely applied to nouns, as it is at this day in German, such 
words as an ungentleman, unnobleness, unhap, itnkunnynge, 
(ignorance,) unpower, (impotence,) unright, and the like, often 
occurring in old writers. In words of Latin origin, modern 
English generally substitutes non for the inseparable particle 
un-, as non-conformity.* 

A curious mode of changing, extending, or restricting the 
sense of nouns, not indeed peculiar to English, is by ascribing 
different meanings to the singular and the plural. Thus, in 
some communities, where social revolutions are frequent, 
where the low of one generation are the lofty of the next, 
and where at the same time there is so little of honest pride, 
that the son is ashamed of the paternal virtues to which he 
owes his own high position, it is very bad mannas to ask a 
gentleman, what was his father's calling, and yet the manner 
of putting the question may be wholly unexceptionable ; and 
on the other hand, one may scrupulously conform to every 



* Trench employs unacquainiance, a hybrid, but authorized by good writers, 
Chough now little used. 

On the Auth. Version of the New Testament, chapter II. 



ABSTRACT NOUNS. 311 

rule of good breeding, and therefore be entitled to the praise 
of good manners, while the manner of every action may be 
ungraceful, or even almost ungracious. And when it was 
asked whether a wealthy lawyer had acquired his great riches 
by his practice, there was a terrible satire in the answer : 
4 Yes, by his practices." 

The formation of abstract nouns from the adjective, or 
rather the use of the adjective itself as an abstract noun, is 
an important feature of many languages, but not suited to 
the genius of modern English, because the want of distinc 
tions of gender in our adjectives makes all such expres- 
sions equivocal. We do indeed, copying from the Greek, use 
the adjective beautiful, in the form the beautiful, to express 
the quality or essence of beauty, but as the form of the ad- 
jective does not indicate number or gender, it is not in such 
phrases necessarily taken abstractly, as is to icaXbv in Greek. 
Nouns of this sort have a very peculiar force in languages 
which, like Greek and German, admit them, nor can their 
place be exactly supplied by any periphrase. The to kclKov 
of the Greeks, the das Schone of the Germans, have no 
precise English equivalent, and the loss of the neuter adjec- 
tive, and consequently of the abstract noun formed from it, 
in modern English, is a serious deficiency in our philosophi- 
cal and critical vocabulary. 

The only striking peculiarity of the English adjective, as 
compared with the same part of speech in other languages, is 
its invariability, or its want of distinct forms for different cases, 
genders and numbers. The irreconcilability of the Norman 
and the Saxon modes of inflecting adjectives compelled the 
English to discard them both, but the Saxon endings of num- 
ber especially were not given up until the fifteenth century. 



312 THE ENGLISH ADJECTIVE. 

and some of them held out later. Hooker, who spells the ad- 
jective dear without an e in the singular, in using it as a 
plural noun, spells it deare, and says " my dear<2 " for my 
dears, where a modern sermonizer would introduce a noun, 
and say " my dear hearers." Another remarkable form in a 
single instance survived almost as long. I refer to alder, or, 
sometimes and more properly alter, the genitive plural of the 
adjective all. Thus our alder father, our oiler father, means 
father of us all ; alder or alter being properly an adjective, 
and our used as a personal, not an adjective, pronoun in the 
genitive plural. Palsgrave very frequently, and indeed most 
usually, gives the adjective a plural form in s where it fol- 
lows the noun, as verbs passives, verbs actyves personalles. 

There was, for a long time, an increasing inclination to 
reject the regular comparative and superlative degrees, and 
to substitute in all cases the comparison by more and most, a 
construction Norman in form, though the qualifying adverbs 
are Saxon. The prevalence of this latter method at the period 
in question was one of the fruits of that Gallic influence, 
which, during the early and latter part of the seventeenth 
century, so seriously threatened the literary and linguistic as 
well as the political nationality of England, but happily 
we have now returned to our native allegiance, and the legit- 
imate and expressive Saxon inflection has recovered its law- 
ful ascendency.* The rejection of the signs of case, gender, 



* We employ, in polysyllabic adjectives the inflected superlative more freely 
than the inflected comparative, for the reason that the ending er has a different 
Bignificance when applied to nouns, and therefore an adjective compared by that 
ending might be confounded with a noun of like form. See Lecture VI. 

The following extract from a letter, written about 1470, shows a curious suc- 
cession of superlatives in both modes of comparison : " Ye most corteys gen- 
tlest wysest kyndest most companabyll freest largeest most bownteous knyght 



THE ENGLISH VEKB. 313 

and number is attended with the common inconvenience of 
all our syntax, the necessity of assigning to the adjective, as 
well as to other words, a fixed position in the period ; but in 
point of force and precision of expression, little has been 
lost by discarding the inflections of this part of speech, and 
especially the superfluous distinction between the definite and 
the indefinite forms. 

The English verb, in common with that of the Germanic 
dialects, is distinguished from the Latin and Greek by the 
want of a passive voice, and of future tenses, by the fewness 
of its past tenses, and by the admission of the letter-change 
as a mode of conjugation. I shall notice hereafter a tenden- 
cy of early English to the creation of new verbal forms,* but 
I have not detected any unequivocal trace of a rudimental 
passive, of the development of which the Swedish and Danish 
offer so interesting an example, or of a true future, for the 
occasional coalescence of will and shall with the verb to be, 
as wtibe and shalbe, is rather a matter of orthographical 
and typographical convenience than a grammatical aggluti- 
nation. It is a curious fact that the Romance languages, as 
well as the Romaic, at one period of their history, all re- 
jected the ancient inflected futures, and formed new com- 
pound or auxiliary ones, employing for that purpose the 
verbs will and shall, or have in the sense of duty or necessity, 
though French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese have now 
agglutinated the infinitive and auxiliary into a simple future, f 
Why is it that the Gothic languages have always possessed a 



my Lord the Erie of Arran. * * * He is on the .yghtest delyuerst best spoken 
fayrest Archer devowghtest most p' fyghte and trewest to hys Lady of all the 
Knyghtys that ever I was aqweyntyd wt." — Paston Letters, II. 96. 

* See Lecture XVIII. f See Lecture XV. 



514 FUTURE OF MODERN VERBS. 

past tense, never a future ? Why did the Romance dialects 
retain the Latin past forms, and reject the Latin future ? A 
philological fact of so comprehensive a nature must have 
some common psychological ground, for we certainly cannot 
ascribe it to any external linguistic influence. It is perhaps 
not an absurd suggestion, that we may find the explanation in 
the habits of thought and feeling resulting from states of 
society, which had too little of the elements of stable security, 
steady progress, and seductive hope, to encourage much spec- 
ulation as to what the morrow might bring forth. To our 
rude ancestors, and to the people of southern Europe in the 
middle ages, the present was full of stern necessities, the 
past, of hard and painfully impressed realities. The future 
offered but dim uncertainties, and hopeless anticipations. 
Hence they lived, not in a dream-land of the imagination to 
be realized in the good time coming, but in a now which de- 
manded the exertion of their mightiest energies, or in 2, past, 
whose actuality had stamped itself upon their inmost natures. 
The future was too doubtful to justify the employment of 
words implying prediction or even hope, and they appropri- 
ated to it forms indicative of a present purpose, determina- 
tion, or duty, not of prophecy or of expectation. 

The English verb is moreover distinguished from that of 
most other languages by the remarkable peculiarity of want- 
ing characteristic radical forms. To this observation there 
are a few exceptions. We have the Greek and French end- 
ing -ize, as in energize, the Latin -ate, as in create, and the 
Latin and French fy, as to fructify, to specify. But these are 
employed only with Greek, Latin and French roots; and such 
anomalous derivatives as Sylvester's boundify and our Amer 



THE ENGLISH VERB. tfJ.O 

ican hajppify have met with little success/ s that these end- 
ings are rather to be considered as elements of the imported 
word than as possessing a properly English significance. We 
have also the Saxon prefix be-, as to bedew, to beleaguer, gen- 
erally applied only to verbal and nominal roots, though we 
sometimes verbalize an adjective by the aid of this prefix, as to 
besot, which is authorized by Milton and Shakespeare. But this 
formation is repugnant to the language, and nothing but the 
want of a good synonym has enabled Mr. Jefferson's verb to 
belittle to keep its place. The English verb, like that of most 
other languages, is, in the majority of cases, derived from a 
noun, and the want of a specific verbal form renders the trans- 
fer of a word from the class of nouns to that of verbs per- 
fectly idiomatic and proper, though, as I have just remarked, 
we now rarely employ that process. There is one important 
ending, however, by the aid of which we may convert adjec- 
tives into verbs. This is the ending -en, as to blackm. The 
resemblance between this form and the Saxon infinitive end- 
ing -an, naturally suggests the supposition of their identity, 
and this view would seem to be confirmed by the fact that it 
is applied to Saxon radicals only, but grammarians generally 
consider the coincidence of sound accidental, and the mod- 
ern termination in -en, which is not the sign of a mood like the 
Saxon -an, but the characteristic of a part of speech, is re- 
garded as the development of a new grammatical form. A 
few verbs of this class, as lengthen and strengthen, are de- 
rived from nouns, the noun being probably employed instead 
of the conjugate adjective for orthoepical reasons, but, in 
general, only adjectives expressing the sensuous qualities of 

* Robertson uses happificd. 

Address to Working Man's Institute. 



316 THE ENGLISH VERB. 

objects at present admit of this change. In cl Her stages of 
the language it was otherwise. In the Omiulum we find to 
gooden, to make good, also to benefit, and Milton and Southey 
employ the verb to worsen, to make or grow worse, but this 
has unhappily fallen into disuse.* The reason of this is 
doubtless to be found in the disposition which long prevailed 
to restrict the employment of Saxon words to the expression 
of the material and the sensuous, and to borrow the phrase- 
ology of moral and intellectual discourse from the Greek, the 
Latin, and the French. 

The English substantive verb, or that which expresses 
"being, and which in most instances serves only as a copula to 
connect the subject and the predicate, partakes of the irreg- 
ularity which generally marks the conjugation of the corre- 
sponding verb in other languages. Its different parts are 
doubtless derived from different radicals, for be and am can 
hardly be supposed to be divergent forms of the same word. 
The Saxon weorthan, which corresponded to the German 
werden, has unfortunately become obsolete, and now sur- 
vives only in the phrases : wo worth the day ! wo worth the 
man ! and the like. Weorthan, though in some sort often 
an auxiliary, was not used as a sign of the passive, like the 
German werden, but generally retained its independent 



* In Wycliffe's time, the adjective was often used as a verb, without any 
change of form except such as was occasioned by the inflections then in use. 
Thus, Matthew xxiii. 12 : " Forsothe he that shal hie hym self shal be rnekid; and 
he that shal meeke hymself shal ben enhaunsid." And in Luke xiv. 11 : " And he 
that mekith him self, shal be highed" Wotton makes honest a verb, with no 
change but that of inflection. 

" The pretence, whereby a desperate discontented assassinate would after the 
perpetration have honesied a meer private revenge." Reliquiae, 1651, p. 34. 
The use of the passive form assassinate for assassin is also noticeable in this 
extract. See Appendix, 46. 



THE ENGLISH VERB. 317 

signification, and its disappearance is a real loss to the Ian* 
gunge.* 

In the opinion of the ablest linguists, English has lost 
nothing in force, variety, or precision of expression, by the 
simplification of its forms, and the substitution of determina- 
tives for inflections. The present movement is still in the same 
direction. The subjunctive is evidently passing out of use, 
and there is good reason to suppose that it will soon become 
obsolete altogether. The compound past infinitive also, for- 
merly very frequent, is almost disused. Lord Berners says : 
should have aided to have destroyed, had made haste to have 
entered, and the like, and this was common in colloquial 
usage until a very recent period. In cases of this sort, where 
the relations of time are clearly expressed by the first auxil- 
iary, it is evident that nothing is gained by employing a sec- 
ond auxiliary to fix more precisely the category of the infin- 
itive, but where the simple inflected past tense precedes the 
infinitive, there is sometimes ground for the employment of 
an auxiliary with the latter. I intended to go and I intended 
to have gone, do not necessarily express precisely the same 
thing, but the latter form is not likely long to resist the pres- 
ent inclination to make the infinitive strictly aoristic, and 
such forms as I had intended to go will supersede the past 
tense of the latter mood. 

* Weorthan, or worthen, is not unfrequent in early English. For example, 
in one of the old Prologues to the English Scriptures, Wycliffite Versions, I., p. 
tO, note, we find : 

" Alle gladnes and delite of this erthely vanyte vanyschith, and at the last 
wortkith to nought " In fact this verb did not become altogether obsolete until 
the seventeenth century, for Hey wood says : 

"Thou therefore that want nothing before thou wert, &c, &c." "Thou, 
which wast not, wert made." " Give me a reason (if thou canst) how thou wer 
created." The Hierarchic of the blessed Angells, London, 1635, p. 383. 

In these cases, wert is not the subjunctive of the verb to be, but a remnant 
of worthen, and, in the last two, used as a passive auxiliary. 



LECTURE XV 



GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS. 



In considering the interjection, it was stated that' words 
of that class were distinguished from all other parts of speech 
by the quality of inherent and complete significance, so that 
a single ejaculatory monosyllable, or phrase not syntactically 
connected with a period, might alone communicate a fact, or, 
in other words, stand for and express an entire proposition. 
The interjection might be involuntarily uttered, and impart 
a fact of a nature altogether subjective to the speaker, as, for 
example, that he was affected with sensations of physical 
pain or pleasure, with grief or with terror; or it might as- 
sume a form more approximating to that of syntactic Ian-, 
guage, and address itself to an external object, as an ex- 
pression of love, of pity, of hate or execration, of desire, 
command or deprecation. 



* The illustrations, and much of the argument, in this and the following lee 
tures on the same subject, are too familiar to be instructive to educated persons 
but I have introduced them, in the hope that those engaged in teaching languages 
might derive some useful suggestions from them. 



PURPOSES OF INFLECTION. 319 

The application of the distinction between interjections, 
as parts of speech, which, used singly and alone, may commu- 
nicate a fact, a wish, or command, and therefore express an 
entire proposition, and parts of speech which become signifi 
cant only by their connection with other vocables, is properly 
limited to the vocabulary of languages where, as in our own, 
words admit of little or no change of form, and to the simplest, 
least variable forms of words in those other languages, which 
express the grammatical relations, and certain other conditions 
of the parts of speech, by what is called inflection. 

I propose now to illustrate the distinction between in- 
flected and uninflected, or grammatically variable and gram- 
matically invariable words, and to inquire into the essential 
character and use of inflections. Inflection is derived from 
the Latin flecto, I bend, curve or turn, and inflections are 
the changes made in the forms of words, to indicate either 
their grammatical relations to other words in the same period, 
or some accidental condition of the thing expressed by the 
inflected word. The possible relations and conditions of 
words are very numerous, and some languages express more, 
some fewer of them by the changes of form called in- 
flections. 

The languages which embody the general literature of 
Europe, ancient and modern, employ inflections for the fol- 
lowing purposes : First, in nouns, adjectives, pronouns and 
articles, to denote — 

(a) gender, 

(b) number, and 

(c) case, or grammatical relation. 

Secondly, in adjectives and adverbs, to mark degrees of com- 
parison. Thirdly, in adjectives, to indicate whether the word 



320 PURPOSES OF INFLECTION. 

is used in a definite or an indefinite application. Fourthly \ 
in verbs, to express number, person, voice, mood and tense ; 
or, in other words, to determine whether the nominative case, 
the subject of the verb is one or more, singular or plural ; 
whether the speaker, the person addressed, or still another, 
is the subject ; whether the state or action or emotion ex- 
pressed by the verb, is conceived of solely with reference to 
the subject, or as occasioned by an external agency ; whether 
that state, action or emotion, is absolute or conditional ; and 
whether it is past, present or future.* 

Interjections, prepositions and conjunctions are unin- 
fleeted, or invariable in form. 

The variations of the verb are usually the most numer- 
ous, and the uses and importance of inflections may be well 
illustrated by comparing an English uninflected with a Latin 
inflected verb. 

The English defective verb ought is the old preterite of 
the verb to owe, which was at an early period used as a sort 
of auxiliary with the infinitive, implying the sense of neces- 
sity, just as we, and many of the Continental nations, now 
employ have and its equivalents. I have much to do, in 
English; J' ai beaucoup a faire, in French; Ich habe 

* No single one of the languages to which I refer employs inflection for all 
the purposes I have specified. The Greek and Latin have the most complete, 
the English the most imperfect system of variation. The Icelandic, Swedish, 
and Danish exhibit the rare case of a modern passive voice, but, like the other 
tongues ©f the Gothic stock, they want the future tense; and, on the other 
hand, they possess, in common with these latter, the definite and indefinite 
forms of the adjective, which existed also in Anglo-Saxon, but are not distin- 
guished in Greek and Latin. There may be some doubt whether this distinction 
is not rather a special exception than a general characteristic of the inflectional 
system which belongs to the cultivated languages of Europe, but the great 
importance of Scandinavian, German and Anglo-Saxon literature, entitle the 
peculiarities of Gothic grammar to a conspicuous place in all treatises upon mod- 
ern and especially English philology. 



THE VERB OWE AND OUGHT. 6Z\ 

vi el zu thnn, in German, all mean, substantially, there 
is much which I must do. Afterwards, by a common process 
in language, the general idea of necessity involved in this use 
of the word owe resolved itself into two distinct senses : the 
one of pecuniary or other liability in the nature of a debt, 
or the return of an equivalent for property, services or favors 
received ; the other that of moral obligation, or at least of 
expediency. Different forms from the same root were now 
appropriated to the two senses, to owe, with a newly formed 
weak preterite, owed, being exclusively limited to the notion 
of debt, and the simple form ought being employed in all 
moods, tenses, numbers and persons, to express moral obliga- 
tion or expediency, or as an auxiliary verb. 

Before I proceed to illustrate the use of inflections by 
comparing the invariable ought with a Latin inflected verb 
of similar signification, I will pause to offer some further 
observations on the history of the verb to owe. This verb is 
derived from a Gothic radical signifying to have, to possess, 
or, as we now say, in another form of the same word, to own. 
Shakespeare very often uses owe in this sense, both in the pres- 
ent and the new or weak preterite form, owed ; for the separa- 
tion between the two forms owed and ought, though it com- 
menced before Shakespeare's time, was not fully completed 
till a later period. Thus in Twelfth Night, at the close of 
the first act, these lines occur : 

Fate, show thy force : ourselves we do not awe; 
What is decreed must be, and be this so ! 

In like manner in the Tempest I. 2 : 



Thou dost here usurp 
The name thou otrfst not 



21 



322 THE VEEB OWE AND OUGHT. 

And in Macbeth I. 4 : 

To throw away the dearest thing he ow'd, 
As 'twere a careless trifle. 

In these, and very many other cases, the sense is unmistaka- 
bly to possess or own. In English grammar, the auxiliary 
verbs incline to be invariable, as must, will, shall; and 
ought, therefore, at last followed the same rule. But, for 
some time after the distinction between pecuniary and mora 1 
obligation, as expressed by different forms of this word, 
made itself felt, the present tense owe continued to be occa 
sionally employed for both purposes, such expressions as you 
owe to do this, being not unfrequent,* and on the other hand, 
ought was occasion ally, though rarely, used in place of owed 
as late as the time of Dry den. The two phrases, you owe to 
do this, and you ought to do this, are so nearly alike in 
sound, that they would readily be confounded in pronuncia- 
tion, and consequently in writing, and the difficulty of distin- 
guishing between them facilitated the application of the rule 
that auxiliaries are invariable.f The introduction of a new 



* Thus, in one of the prologues to WyclhTe's translation of Clement's Har- 
mony, (Wycliffite Versions, I. xv.,) " Symple men owen not dispute aboute holy 
writ * * but they owen stedfastly bileue." In this instance, the omission of the 
infinitive sign to is remarkable, as showing that owe, though conjugated, was re- 
garded by the writer of the prologue as a true auxiliary, but this does not seem 
to have been the general contemporaneous practice. In the will of Louis 
Clifford, A. 1404, (Southey's Cid, 40*7,) we find, "all things which owen'm such 
caas to be don." I believe Chaucer always uses the particle to before the in- 
finitive in this construction, and the same rule is followed in the Apology for the 
Lollards ascribed to Wycliffe, as well as generally in the Wycliffite versions. 

In a proclamation of Henry III., A. D. 1258, given by Boucher from Henry's 
History of England, and often referred to as the earliest specimen of English, 
both senses of one are exemplified. "And we heaten alle ure treowe, in the 
treowthe that heo us ogen." " And thast sehc other helpe thaet for to done bi 
fcham ilche other, aganes alle men, in alle that heo ogt for to done" See Jlpp. 47 

\ Another instance where the employment of a particular word has been 



USES OF INFLECTIONS OF VERBS. 323 

grammatical form is always attended with much greater em- 
barrassment than that of a new word, and the precise use of 
ought in a new combination did not at once become settled, 
for many old authors employed it as an impersonal, that is, 
as a verb without a nominative, though followed by an ob- 
jective. Thus Chaucer and others say, us ought or oweth to 
do this, him ought or oweth to do that.* But notwithstand- 
ing some vacillation in the grammatical employment of 
ought, it was generally confined to the expression of mere 
moral or prudential obligation long before owe had lost its 
original sense of proprietorship).! 

We will now, after a digression which I hope is not abso- 
lutely irrelevant to our subject, return to the inflections. 

Suppose that, in listening to an indistinct conversation, I 
catch, in a particular period, the word ought only. A vague 
sense of obligation is excited in my mind, but whether that 
obligation is confessed by the speaker as resting upon himself, 
singly, or in conjunction with others, or whether he refers to a 
duty incumbent upon the friend or friends whom he is address- 
changed, to avoid the same confusion between the present and the past tense, 
jnay properly be noticed here. The verb to use, formerly served as a frequent- 
ative auxiliary in the present as well as the past, such phrases as " do use to 
chani it," " the lodging where you use to lie," being of very common occurrence 
;n Shakespeare, and contemporary as well as older writers. I use to and fused 
to are so nearly the same in articulation, that in ordinary speaking they could 
not be distinguished, and the present tense of use in this sense is therefore al- 
most entirely abandoned, the indicative present of the dependent verb supply- 
ing the place of the frequentative and infinitive. 

* " He is a japer and a gabber, and not veray repentant, that eftsones doth 
thing for which him oweth to repent." Chaucer's Persones Tale. 

•f- It is a curious instance of the seeming caprices of language, that the 
German h a b e n and the French avoir, both cognate with the root of to owe, and 
like it, employed to express duty or obligation when used as auxiliaries, should, 
in mercantile language, have dropped the signification of debt, and contracted 
an opposite meaning, for h a b e n and avoir as opposed to soil and doit, both 
indicate, not the debit, but the credit side of the account. 



324 USES OF INFLECTIONS OF VEEBS. 

ing, upon some third person, or some number of other per- 
sons ; whether he designates the obligation as past, as now 
demanding performance, or as hereafter to accrue, absolutely 
or in some particular contingency ; upon none of these points 
does the form of the word I have happened to hear give me 
any information whatever. For any thing that the form of 
the verb ought shows to the contrary, the speaker may have 
said, /ought, he ought, we ought, you ought, or they ought ; 
he may have referred to the present moment, or any past 
or future time, as the period when the duty becomes obliga- 
tory ; or he may have treated the duty as contingent or con- 
ditional altogether. ISTow, if the conversation had been car- 
ried on in Latin, no such uncertainty about number, person, 
time or mood could have arisen, because the termination of 
the word corresponding to ought would, of itself, have re- 
solved every one of these doubts. The moment the word 
was uttered, even without a pronoun or other nominative, I 
should have been informed whether the duty was charged 
upon the speaker ; upon one or more persons to whom, or 
one or more persons of whom he was speaking ; whether the 
time for the performance was past, present or future ; and 
whether it was represented as an absolute or as a conditional 
obligation. To express all possible categories of the word 
ought, we have one form and no more, and the context, the 
remainder of the sentence in which it occurs, the pronoun or 
other nominative which precedes, and the infinitive which 
follows, must be called in to determine its multiplied relations 
of time, person and condition. The equivalent of ought in 
Latin is a verb whose radical is conceived to be the monosyl- 
lable d e b , * which still constitutes the first syllable in all 

* I speak of deb as the inflectional, not the etymological root of debeo. 



USES OF INFLECTIONS OF VERBS. 325 

the forms of the verb. In the infinitive mood, present tense, 
the form is deb ere, and this word admits of more than 
fifty inflections or changes of termination in the active 
voice alone, all so distinctly marked, that each one instantly 
suggests to the mind of the hearer the answer to every one 
of the points I have mentioned as left undetermined by the 
corresponding English verb ought, whicli expresses nothing 
but the naked fact of a duty incumbent, at an uncertain 
time, upon an uncertain person or persons. 

If the isolated word I have caught happen to be d eb e o , 
I know that the speaker acknowledges a present duty incum- 
bent upon himself; had it been debuisti, I should have 
understood that reference was made to a past obligation of 
the person addressed ; if debebunt, to a future duty of more 
than one third person ; if d e b u e r i m u s , to a conditional 
duty of the speaker and some other person or persons. All 
these forms are active, and make the person bound the sub- 
ject of the period; but the duty itself maybe made the 
subject, and then an equally full set of passive inflections 
may be used, in some cases indeed with the aid of an auxil- 
iary, to express substantially the same ideas.* This may be 
said to be an extreme case, because although hundreds of 
Latin verbs are as complete in their inflections as deb ere, 
yet many are far less so, and on the other hand the English 
example is a simple auxiliary, and as such little susceptible of 

Debeo is considered by some as a contract of the compound de-habeo, I 
•Lave from, that is, I have from another what still belongs to him, and, there- 
fore, what I owe to him. The form dehabeois used by Jerome as a negative of 
habeo, I have not, I want; and the etymology I have just mentioned is rather 
too refined to be probable. 

* We should perhaps not be able to find instances of the actual occurrence 
of debeo as expressive of obligation, in all the active and passive inflections, 
but such are grammatically and logically possible. 



326 INFLECTIONS OF ADJECTIVES. 

inflection. This is indeed true, but it is a mere difference ii< 
degree. Our verbs generally, excluding the obsolescent see 
ond and third persons singular, in -est and -eth as \ovest, 
loveth, have but three or four changes of form, and all the 
other categories are clumsily expressed by means of aux 
iliaries. 

In like manner, our adjectives admit no inflection what- 
ever, except in the degrees of comparison. Thus the adjec- 
tive beautiful is applied equally to persons of either sex, to 
the subject or the object of the verb, and to one or more 
persons, without any change of form. We say a beautiful 
boy or girl, beautiful boys or girls, whether the substantive 
to which it is applied be in the nominative, possessive or ob- 
jective case. In short, the adjective is, except in comparison, 
indeclinable, invariable, or uninflected, all of which terms are 
employed to express the same thing. The Latin adjective 
pule her, meaning beautiful, has, on the contrary, twelve 
different forms in the positive degree alone, and in the com- 
parative and superlative twenty-two more, making thirty- 
four in all. 

Thus we say in Latin, in the nominative case, pule her 
puer, a beautiful boy, pulchra puella, a beautiful girl; 
in the genitive or possessive, pulchri pueri, of a beau- 
tiful boy, pulchrse puellse, of & beautiful girl ; in the 
accusative, corresponding generally to the objective of Eng- 
lish grammarians, pulchrum puerum, a beautiful boy, 
pulchram puellam, a beautiful girl.* 

* The Horatian verse : 

m&tre pulchra filia pulchrior / 
fairer daughter of a fair mother ! or, 
daughter fairer than [thy] fair mother ! 
Is a good example of the superior gracefulness of expression in inflected Ian- 



INFLECTIONS OF NOUNS. 327 

Some of these forms indeed are equivocal, the same in- 
flection being used with different cases or genders, but nearly 
all of them clearly and certainly indicate the number, most 
of them the grammatical relations, and many of them the 
gender of the noun to which the adjective is applied. Sub- 
stantives also, admitting in English no change of form, ex- 
cept the indication of the genitive or possessive case and the 
plural number, go through a wide range of variation in 
Latin, every syntactical category having its appropriate form. 
Tims it will have been observed that in the examples I have 
cited, pulcher puer and pulchra puella, in every 
case the termination of the adjective and the noun is the 
same; pulcher puer, pulchri pueri, pulchrum 
puerum, pulchra puella, &c, but it is not necessary 
that the endings be alike. It suffices that particular endings 
be used together. There is another and more common form 
of the Latin adjective, in which the termination of the mas- 
culine nominative is not -er, but -us. The adjective bo- 
nus, good, is an example of this, and if bonus were used 
with the same substantive puer in the nominative case, the 
phrase would stand bonus puer. Here the endings are 
not alike, but when the syllable -us is once accepted as one 
of the signs by which the masculine nominative is recognized, 
there is no difficulty in its use. 

In teaching Latin by that excellent method, the writing 
of themes, it is common to give the pupil the words of which 
he is to compose his periods in their simplest forms, leaving 



guages, but it is more equivocal than the English, for, though in this instance 
there is no logical difficulty in the construction, there is nevertheless a gramma 
tieal uncertainty whether the lady addressed is compared with her mother, or 
the mothei of some other person. 



328 POSITION OF WORDS. 

it to him to inflect them according to their intended relations. 
In this case, the words constitute no period, express no prop- 
osition, and are as meaningless as wonld be a like number of 
English verbs, nonns and adjectives, arranged without refer- 
ence to grammatical relation, and unsupplied with the parti 
cles and auxiliaries which, in connection with certain laws 
of position, indicate to us categories that, in other languages, 
are expressed by inflection. For instance, in the English 
phrase, sheep fear man, the words are all in their simplest, 
uninnected form, the form which, as we suppose, comes near- 
est to their primitive radical shape, but we have no difficulty 
in determining their relations to each other. We know that 
sheep, which comes first in the proposition, is the subject or 
nominative of the verb, fear, and that man, which follows 
the verb, is its object or objective case. Now, if we take the 
corresponding Latin words in the simplest, most indefinite form 
in which they occur in that language, we have ovis,timere, 
h omo; but this succession of words would convey to a Ro- 
man no meaning whatever, and in order to make it intelligi- 
ble to him, we must begin with o vis, the nominative sin- 
gular of the Latin word for sheep, and transform it into 
oves, which is the regular nominative plural of that form 
of nouns ; timere, the infinitive corresponding to the Eng- 
lish verb fear, must be changed into timent, which is the 
indicative present, third person plural of that verb, and 
homo, the nominative singular of the Latin word for man, 
into the accusative or objective, hominem, or the plural 
homines. The proposition would then stand, oves ti- 
ment hominem, and as I shall show hereafter, the mean- 
ing would to a Roman be equally clear, and precisely the 
same, if the order of the words were reversed, hominero 
t i m e n t oves. 



VARIETY OF INFLECTIONS. 329 

I have taken my illustrations from the Latin, as a tongue 
more or less familiar to all of us, but although, as compared 
with English, its system of inflection may be considered very 
complete, yet it is extremely meagre when measured by 
that of many other languages. In Turkish, for example, a 
numerous class of verbs has, first, its simple, its reflective, 
and its reciprocal forms ; to each of these belongs a causative 
form, thus making six, all active and affirmative. Then 
comes the passive of each, giving us twelve, and every one 
of these twelve has, besides its affirmative form, a negative and 
an impossible conjugation, so that we have thirty-six funda- 
mental forms, each of which, in its different moods, tenses, 
numbers and persons, admits of about one hundred inflec- 
tions, thus giving to the verb three or four thousand distinctly 
marked expressive forms. But even this wide range of in- 
flection by no means exhausts the possible number of varia- 
tions indicative of grammatical relation, or other conditions 
of the verb, for, in some languages, there are duals, or 
verbal forms exclusively appropriated to the number two, 
and in others, the verb has special inflections for the different 
genders. Again, in some tongn es, there are forms expressive of 
iteration or repetition, called frequentatives, as from the Latin 
dico, I say, the frequentative dictito, in nursery Eng- 
lish, I keep saying. There are also forms expressive of desire, 
as from the Latin edo, I eat, esurio, I desire to eat, I am 
hungry ; and of commencement, or tendency, as from the 
Latin caleo, lam warm, calesco, I^rowwarai; from sil- 
v a , a wood, silvescere, to run to wood, (of a vine plant ;) 
from arbor, a tree, arborescere, to become a tree.* 

* Fuller, who had a heroic contempt for all word-fetters, translates the haec 
plantainJudea arborescit of Grotius, by "hyssope doth tree it in Judea.* 
Pisgah Sight of Palestine, I., 10, § 8. 



330 VARIETY OF INFLECTIONS. 

In Spanish and Italian there are numerous Terminations 
applied to substantives and adjectives, indicative of aug- 
mentation or diminution, affection or dislike, and these are 
sometimes piled one upon the other by way of superlative. 
Thus from the Italian uomo, a man, we have omaccio, 
a bad man, omaccino, a very little man, omaccione, a 
large, or sometimes a noble-minded, man, omacciotto, a 
mean little man, ometto or omettolo, a small man, 
omiciatto or o m i c i a "t t o 1 o , an insignificant man. 

These last words, indeed, as well as some of the verbal 
forms I have cited, may be said to be derivatives rather 
than inflections, because they express qualities or accidents, 
not syntactical relations or conditions, and belong therefore 
to the domain of logic, not properly to that of grammar, ex- 
cept simply so far as the whole history of words belongs to 
grammar. It appears to me, nevertheless, that all regular 
changes of words may be called inflections, and the power 
of modifying vocables by such changes is as characteristic of 
different lan^ua^es as the variations of termination or of radical 
vowel, which are generally embraced in that designation. 

The speech of the Spanish Basques, one of those rare spo- 
radic, or as they have been sometimes called, insular lan- 
guages, which long maintain themselves in the midst of 
unallied tongues and hostile influences, appears to be unsur- 
passed, if not unequalled, in variety of inflection. Thus all 
the parts of speech, including prepositions, conjunctions, in- 
terjections and other particles, admit of declension. There 
are six nominative forms and twelve cases of the noun. The 
adjective has twenty cases. Every Romance verb is repre- 
sented by twenty-six radical forms, each with a great number 
of inflections; and different modes of conjugation are em- 



VARIETY OF INFLECTIONS. 331 

ployed in addressing a child, a woman, an equal or a 
superior.* 

Thus far we have spoken of simple words only, and their 
regular derivatives, but if they be compounded, still more 
complex ideas may be conveyed, and finally, in some lan- 
guages, by the process to which we have before referred, 
called agglutination, but not always distinguishable from 
more familiar modes of composition, or even from inflection, 
several words may be compressed into one, and thus a single 
verb may of itself stand for a whole sentence, expressing at 
once the subject, the copula, the object, as well as numerous 
predicates or qualifications of all of them. 

Not only the objects, but the methods, of inflection are 
very various in different tongues, and a single language often 
avails itself of more than one of them. It may be stated 
that there are two leading modes of variation, both sufficient- 
ly exemplified in English, the one consisting in a change of 
some of the elements, usually vowels, of the root-form, the 
other in prefixing or subjoining additional syllables, or at 
least vocal elements, to the radical. Of the first sort the 
letter-change, our verb to ride is an example, the diphthongal 
long i of the root being changed into o in the preterite rode, 
and into simple short i in the participle ridden. So run, 
ran • write, wrote, (in old English wrate,) written • fly, flew, 
and so forth. In like manner man makes men in the plural, 
foot, fleet, goose, geese, and the like. The Scandinavian and 
Teutonic languages, which are so closely al lied to English 
both in grammar and in vocabulary, much affect the letter- 
change, and we find in all of them, as well as in Anglo-Sax- 
on, traces of a much more extensive use of this principle at 

* Quatrefages. Souvenirs d'ui tSaturaliste. 



332 MODES OF INFLECTION. 

some earlier period of linguistic development For instance, 
in all these languages the verb had probably once a regular 
causative form, consisting in a vowel-change, and it is curious 
that the remains of this form should be found at this day in 
the same roots of each of them. Thus, the neuter verb to 
fall lias its causative to foil, that is to cause to fall, as to fell 
a tree with an axe, to fell a man by a blow ; the neuter to 
lie, its causative to lay, to make to lie, or place ; and the 
neuter to sit, its causative to set, in several different applica- 
tions. These same neuters, with their respective causatives, 
exist in Danish, Swedish and German, as well as in English. 
The resemblance in their forms leads occasionally to confusion 
in their use. The causative to set, in its different accepta- 
tions, is a sad stumbling-block to persons who are not strong 
in their accidence, and to lie and to lay are so frequently 
confounded, that even Byron, in his magnificent apostrophe 
to the Ocean, was guilty of writing " there let him lay." 
Neither the English nor the other languages of the Gothic 
stock now do, nor, so far as we are able to follow them back 
historically, ever did, exclude inflection by the mode of ad- 
dition of letters or syllables, and the two methods of conju- 
gation and declension appear to have co-existed from a very 
remote period. Although, therefore, we inflect many Saxon 
primitives by augmentation, yet we confine the letter-change 
almost wholly to words of that stock, and we generally, if 
not always, inflect Latin and other foreign roots by augmen- 
tation. Thus the verb to amend, which we derive from the 
Latin through the French, forms its preterite amende by 
the addition of the syllable -ed to the simple form. The 
Latin-English noun possession makes its plural by subjoining 
9, possessions. We still use prefixes largely in composition, 
but as a nectional element, although they were a good deal 



MODES OF INFLECTION. 666 

employed in Anglo-Saxon, they must now be cc nsidered ob- 
solete. The syllabic prefix ge-, regularly used in Anglo- 
Saxon with preterites, and often with past participles, as well 
as in many other cases, long retained its ground, and is yet 
sometimes employed in the archaic style of poetry, in the 
form of a y, which, in our orthography, nearly represents the 
probable pronunciation of the Saxon augment. Spenser uses 
this augment very frequently, and Thomson often employs 
it in the Castle of Indolence, both of them merely for metri- 
cal convenience.* 

Of these two leading modes of variation, the former, 
which consists in a change of letter in the radical form, is 
called the strong, the latter, consisting in the addition of 



* In Milton it occurs but thrice, and in one of these three instances it is 
a^ plied in a very unusual way. In the first printed of Milton's poetical com- 
positions, the Epitaph on Shakespeare, we find the lines : 

What needs my Shakespeare, for his honor'd bones, 
The labor of an age in piled stones ? 
Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid, 
Under a star-y pointing pyramid ? 

Here the syllabic augment y- is prefixed to a present participle, a form of which 
there are very few examples, though ilestinde, y- lasting, or permanent, occurs 
in the proclamation of King Henry III., referred to in a note on page 322. 
The prefix is rarely applied to any but Saxon radicals, and thus y-pointing is a 
double departure from the English idiom. Y-pointsd, indeed, is found in Robert 
of Gloucester, and it is possible that Milton wrote y-pointed, in which case the 
meaning would be pointed or surmounted with a star, like some of the Egyptian 
obelisks, which have received this decoration since they were transferred to 
Europe, instead of pointing to the stars. 

It is not here inappropriate to remark that the expletive ywiss often written 
Iwiss, as if it were two words, and understood to be the first person indicative 
present of an obsolete verb to wiss, to teach, direct, or affirm, with the pronoun 
of the first person, is only the Anglo-Saxon form of an adverb derived from a 
participle, and corresponding exactly to the German gewiss, meaning surely, 
certainly. The erroneous explanation above alluded to is sometimes found where 
one would hardly expect to meet it, as for instance, in the Glossary to Scott'a 
edition of Sir Tristram. 



334 STRONG AND WEAK INFLECTIONS. 

vocal elements to the root, the weak inflection. The principle 
on which this nomenclature is founded is that the power of 
varying a word by change of its more unessential constituents, 
without external aid in the way of composition or addition 
of syllables, implies a certain vitality, a certain innate, or- 
ganic strength not possessed by roots capable of variation 
only by the incorporation or addition of foreign elements. 
The weak inflection is the regular, the strong, the irregular 
form of the older grammarians, but according to the theory 
now in vogue, the strong is the more ancient and regular of 
the two modes of inflection, and the terms ought to be re- 
versed. The suffrage of children, who are acute philologists, 
and extremely apt in seizing the analogies of language, and 
therefore credible witnesses, is in favor of the regularity and 
linguistic propriety of the weak inflection. They say I 
runned, I rided, and the like, and Cobbett, an unlearned, 
indeed, but excellent practical grammarian, as well as some 
better instructed philologists, have seriously proposed to re- 
form our grammar by rejecting the strong preterites and par- 
ticiples, and inflecting all verbs according to the regular 01 
weak method,* 

* The tendency of modern English to the more extended use of the weak 
inflection is so powerful, that uuless it be checked by increased familiarity with 
our earlier literature, it is not improbable that the strong declensions and con- 
jugations will disappear altogether. A comparison of the modern poets with 
Chaucer, and even much later writers, will show that hundreds of verbs formerly 
inflected with the letter-change, are now conjugated by augmentation. Every 
new English dictionary diminishes the number of irregular verbs. Webster 
tells us that swollen, as the participle of swell, is now nearly obsolete. Popular 
speech however still preserves this form, as well as many other genuine old pre- 
terites and participles, which are no longer employed in written English. Even 
heat, (pronounced hefc,) now a gross vulgarism, occurs as the participle of to heat, 
as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century. See Holland's Pliny, II, 
393, and Daniel III., 19, in the original edition of the standard translation of 
the Bible. 



STRONG AND WEAK INFLECTIONS. 33/5 

But whatever may be thought of the relative antiquity 
of the forms, the notion on which the new nomenclature rests 
is a fanciful one, and it is unfortunate that terms so inappro 
priate should have been sanctioned by so high authority, and 
so generally adopted by grammarians. Had the two modes 
been called, respectively, old and new, the names would have 
expressed a historical fact, or at least a probable theory, but 
it would be easy to assign as sound and as obvious reasons 
for designating the two classes of variation by ascribing to 
them color or weight, and for calling them black and white, 
or heavy and light, as those alleged for the use of the terms 
strong and weak. It certainly could not have been difficult 
to invent appellations more appropriate in character, and it 
is to be regretted that the difficulties of grammatical science 
should be augmented by increasing the number of fallacious 
terms in its vocabulary. 

Various theories have been suggested to explain the origin 
of the changes of form in different classes of words in in- 
flected languages. These I cannot here discuss or even detail. 
It must suffice to observe that, with respect to the strong in- 
flections, or those consisting in si letter-change, as, present run, 
past rem, singular man, plural men, it is at least a plausible 
supposition, that they originated in different pronunciations 
of the same word in different local dialects, the respective 
pronunciations each assuming a distinct significance, as the 
dialects melted into one speech. As to the weak inflections, 
those consisting in the addition of vocal elements, it has 
been conjectured that these elements were in all cases origi- 
nally pronouns, auxiliaries or particles which have coalesced 
with the verb or other root. In general the inflections were 
adopted so early, and the pronouns or other absorbed words 



336 0KIGIN OF INFLECTIONS. 

have become so much modified, that they can no longer bo 
recognized in their combination with the inflected word. 
But there are some instances where we possess historical evi- 
dence of snch a coalescence. The future of the verb in all 
the Romance languages is a case of this sort. Thus am are, 
a m a r a s, amara, the future of the Sp anish verb amar, is 
simply amar he, I have to love; amar has, thou hast 
to love; amar ha, he has to love.* In the closely allied 
Portuguese, the constituents of the future may still be used 
separately, and even an oblique case inserted between them ; 
as dar-lhe-hei, I will give him, agastar-se-ha, he will 
be angry. This was also common in old Castilian, and we 
find in Beuter such combinations ascastigarosemos, evi- 
dently os hemos de castigar,we will punish you. The 
formation of many of the other tenses may readily be traced 
in the older literature of other Peninsular dialects. Thus we 
find in the Catalan of King Jaume,f the first person plural 
of the conditional, with an oblique case, here a dative, in- 
serted ; nos donar los niem 90 q valien, we would 
pay them for them [the horses] what they were worth. 

There is a more interesting example of a newly formed 
inflection in languages cognate with our own, and I shall 



* The Moeso-Gothic verb hah an, to have, was used as a future auxiliary, 
not as a past. Thus, in John xh. 26 : "jab parei im ik, paruh sa andbahta 
meins visan habaip," and where I am, there my servant shall be. And when 
used in the past tense, it still involved the future corresponding to the would 
nd should of the English Bible in a similar construction, as in John vi. 6 : 
ip silba vissa, patei habaida taujan," for he himself knew what he would 
do; and John vi. 71: "Quapuh pan pana iudan seimonis iskariotu sa auk 
habaida ina galevjan." He spake of Judas Iscariot the son of Simon; for he 
it was that should betray him. 

f Conquesta de Valencia por lo serenissim e catholich princep do Jaume, 
Valencia, 1515. 



ORIGIN OF INFLECTIONS. 337 

point out other remarkable instances of a tendency in the 
same direction, in discussing the Old-English inflections.* 
The Icelandic has a reflective form of the verb, used also as 
a passive, the characteristic of which is the consonantal ending 
s t or z : thus the active infinitive at kalla, to call, makes 
the reflective kallast or kallaz. This was anciently 
written sc or sk instead of st, and there is no doubt that 
it was originally simply a contraction of the reflective pro- 
noun sik, corresponding to our self, or more exactly to the 
French reflective se, so that at kallast was equivalent to 
to call one's self \ or the French s'appeler. The form in 
question was at first purely reflective. It gradually assumed 
a passive force, and there are a few instances of its employ- 
ment as such by classic writers in the best ages of that lit- 
erature, f In modern Swedish and Danish, it is a true pas- 
sive. I dwell upon this philological fact the more, because it 
is one of the few cases where we can show the origin of an 
inflection, and it is also specially interesting as an instance of 
the recent development of a passive conjugation in a lan- 
guage belonging to a family, which, in common with most 
modern European tongues, has rejected the passive form al- 
together. Although the theories I have mentioned serve to 
furnish an explanation of many cases of both weak and 
strong inflection, there are numerous flectional phenomena 
which they fail to account for. We must seek the rationale 
of these in more recondite principles, or, in the present state 
of philological knowledge, confess our inability to propose 



* See Lecture XVIII. 

f Eigi munu ver pat gera, segir SkarphcSinn pviat fast mun aimat til elld 
kveykna, Njala, C. 125. Eigi muni fast slikr kostr; Fornmanna Sogur III. 73, 
Raudgrani sast pa ekki. Forn. Sog. Norft. II., 244. 
22 



838 ORIGIN OF INFLECTIONS. 

ft solution, and we are sometimes tempted to maintain with 
Becker, that language, as an organism, has its laws of devel- 
opment and growth, by virtue of which the addition of vocal 
elements to the root is as purely a natural geraiination as the 
sprouting of a bud at the end of a stem or in the axilla of a 
leaf. No theory of agglutination or coalescence will ex- 
plain the general resemblance of the genitive singular to the 
nominative plural in English nouns, and the like coincidence 
between the same cases in the masculine and feminine gen- 
ders of Latin substantives and adjectives. The characteristic 
endings of the genders, and the identity of form between the 
nominative, accusative and vocative cases in the neuter gen- 
der of adjectives and substantives in both Greek and Latin 
are peculiarities of an equally obscure character.* Linguis- 

* Archbishop Whately makes the following suggestion in his annotation on 
Lord Bacon's sixteenth essay : 

" In that phenomenon in language, that both in the Greek and Latin, nouns 
of the neuter gender, denoting things, invariably had the nominative and the ac- 
cusative the same, or rather had an accusative only, employed as a nominative 
when required, — may there not be traced an indistinct consciousness of the 
persuasion that a mere thing is not capable of being an agent, which a person 
only can really be ; and that the possession of power, strictly so called, by phys- 
ical causes, is not conceivable, or their capacity to maintain, any more than to 
produce at first, the system of the universe ? — whose continued existence, as 
well as its origin, seems to depend on the continued operation of the great 
Creator. May there not be in this an admission that the laws of nature pre- 
suppose an agent, and are incapable of being the cause of their own observ- 
ance ? " 

It is with diffidence that I venture any criticism on so profound a thinker 
and so accurate a writer as the distinguished scholar from whom I quote, but it 
appeal's to me that this view of the case supposes grammatical gender to be eS' 
sentially indicative of sex, that sex is a necessary attribute of all personality, 
'ncluding that of the Deity, and that want of sex distinguishes the thing from 
the person. The Greeks as well as the Latins, generally at least, employed 
gender as a mere grammatical sign, for the names of thousands of things in 
both languages, are masculine and feminine, and on the other hand beings arc 
in very many cases designated by words of the neuter gender. The words of 
this latter class, it is true, are generally derivatives, diminutives, and the like, 



ORIGIN OF INFLECTIONS. 339 

tics, as a science, is still in its infancy, and its accuumlation 
of facts is but just begun. We shall doubtless hereafter pen- 
etrate much deeper into the mysteries of language, but yet 
we must resign ourselves to the conclusion, that speech, like 
other branches of human inquiry, will be found to have its 
ultimate facts, the detection of whose causative principles is 
beyond our reach. 

but I am aware of no reason to suppose that in any stage of the Greek or Latin, 
whatever may have been the case in the older tongues from which they are de- 
rived, the masculine and feminine forms alone were capable of expressing person- 
ality. The neuter adjective rb &elov is used absolutely for the Divine Being 
or Essence, by Herodotus and by iEschylus. The chorus in the Agamemnon 
applies it to the inspiration of the Divinity. 

1083, XO. XP^ aeiJ/ eotxev a/upl rwv avrrjs ko.kwv, 
pei/ei rb & e? o v dovAia irapbv (ppevl ; 

and it occurs in the sense of Divine control in the Choephori, v. 966. 

KpureTral 7rwy rb e I o v irapk rb fit] 
virovpyeiv kolkols. 



LECTURE XVI. 

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS. 
II. 

The general principle, which the philological facts stated 
in the last lecture serve to illustrate, is, that in fully in- 
flected languages like the Latin, the grammatical relations, as 
well as many other conditions of words, are indicated by 
their form ; in languages with few inflections, like English, 
by their positions in the period, and by the aid of certain 
small words called auxiliaries and particles, themselves insig- 
nificant, but serving to point out the connection between 
other words. In the proposition which was taken as an ex- 
ample, sheep fear man, oves timent hominem, the 
English words were each employed in the simplest form in 
which they exist in the language, without any variation for 
case, number or person, whereas in the corresponding Latin 
phrase, every word was varied from the radical, or inflected, 
according to its grammatical relations to other words in the 
period. Hence, it will be seen that for determining the rela- 
tions between the constituents of a Latin period, the atten- 
tion is first drawn to the inflected syllables of the words, and 
only secondarily, to their import. These syllables may be 



STRUCTURE OF LATIN PERIOD. 341 

called the mechanical part of grammar, because, though they 
probably once had an intelligible significance in themselves, 
yet that had been lost before Eoman literature had a being, 
and so far back as we can trace the language, they were 
always, as they now are, mere signs of external relations and 
accidental conditions of the words to which they are applied. 
When the first inflected word in a Latin sentence is uttered, 
its relations to the entire proposition are approximately known 
by its ending, its ear-mark ; and the mind of the listener is 
next occupied in sorting out of the words that follow, another, 
whose termination tallies with that of the first ; the process 
is repeated with the second, and so on to the end of the pe- 
riod, the sense being often absolutely suspended until you 
arrive at the key-word, which may be the last in the whole 
sentence. We may illustrate the mental process thus gone 
through, by imagining the words composing an English sen- 
tence to be numbered one, two, three, and so on, but to be 
pronounced or written promiscuously, without any regard to 
the English rules of position and succession. Let it be agreed 
that the nominative, or subject of the verb, shall be marked 
one, the verb two, and the objective case, or object of the 
verb, three. Thus, William 1, struck 2, Peter 3. It is evi- 
dent that if we once become perfectly familiar with the ap- 
plication of the numbers, so that one instantly suggests to us 
the grammatical notion of the subject or nominative, two of 
the verb, and three of the object or objective, the numeral 
being in every case the sign of the grammatical category, the 
position of the words becomes unimportant, and it is indif- 
ferent whether I say William 1, struck 2, Peter 3, or Peter 
3, struck 2, William 1. The subject, the verb, and the ob- 
ject remain the same in both forms, and the meaning of 



34:2 ARRANGEMENT OF PERIOD. 

course must be the same. English-speaking person?, in prac 
tising such lessons, would at first, no doubt, mentally rear- 
range the period, by placing the words in the order of their 
numbers, according to the law of English syntax, just as we 
do in construing or beginning to read a foreign language 
with a syntactical system different from our own. This, in 
long sentences, would be very inconvenient, because the 
words and their numbers must be retained in the memory 
until the sentence is completely spoken or read through, and 
then arranged afterwards ; but practice of this sort would be 
found a useful grammatical exercise, and at the same time 
would facilitate the comprehension of the syntactical princi- 
ples of languages, where the meaning of the period is not 
determined by position. This method of illustrating the prin- 
ciples of syntactical arrangement may seem fanciful, but never- 
theless numbers have been employed by very high English 
authority, in actual literary composition, as a means of mark- 
ing grammatical relation. Sir Philip Sidney, in the third 
book of the Arcadia, introduces a sonnet " with some art 
curiously written," in which the words are arranged chiefly 
according to metrical convenience ; but their relations indicated 
by numbers printed over each word. There is, however, a 
difference between his system of numeration and that which; 
I have used in the example just given. He applies the sarrA 
number to all the words composing each separate member 
of the period, because, in a long proposition containing many 
members, the numbers would be difficult to retain, if running 
on consecutively. Thus, the nominative, the verb, the objec- 
tive and the adverbial phrase of qualification, composing 
the first member, are all marked one y the same elements of 



ARKANGEMENT OF PERIODS. 343 

the second member all marked two, and so of the rest. The 
sonnet is as follows : 

12 3 12 3 

Vertue, beautie, and speech, did strike, wound, charme, 

12 3 1 2 3^ 

My heart, eyes, eares, with wonder, love, delight, 

12 3 12 3 

First, second, last, did binde, enforce, and arme, 

12 3 12 3 

His works, shews, suits, with wit, grace, and vows' might. 

1 2 3 12 3 

Thus honour, liking, trust, much, farre, and deepe, 

12 3 12 3 

Held, pierc't, posses't, my judgment, sense and will, 

1 2 3 12 3 

Till wrong, contempt, deceit, did grow, steale, creepe, 

1 2 3 1 2 3 

Bands, favour, faith, to breake, defile, and kill. 

1 2 3 12 3 

Then griefe, unkindnesse, proofe, tooke, kindled, thought, 

1 2 3 12 3 

Well grounded, noble, due, spite, rage, disdaine, 

12 3 12 3 

But, ah, alas, (in vaine) my minde, sight, thought, 

1 2 3 12 3 

Doth him, his face, his words, leave, shun, refraine. 

12 3 12 3 

For no thing, time, nor place, can loose, quench, ease, 

1 2 3 12 3 

Mine owne, embraced, sought, knot, fire, disease. 

The first four verses transposed according to the rules of Eng* 
lish syntax would read thus : 

i ill 

1 Vertue did strike my heart with wonder, 

2 2 2 2 

2 Beautie " wound " eyes " love, 

3 3 3 3 

3 And speech " charme " eares u delight. 

1111 

1 The first did bind his works with wit, 

2 2 2 2 

2 " second " enforce u shews " grace, 

3 3 3 3 

3 And " last " arme " suits " vows' might. 

A like example occurs in some complimentary verses ad- 
dressed by Edward Ingham to the celet rated John Smith, 
and printed in Smith's History of Virginia : 

12 3 12 3 

Truth, travayle, and neglect, pure, painefull, most unkinde, 

12 3 1 2 3 

Doth prove, consume, dismay, the soule, the corps, the minde. 



314 LATIN INFLECTION. 

Again, we may suppose, that instead of numbering the 
words according to their order in English syntax, the subject, 
verb and object are respectively distinguished by the letters 
of the alphabet, a^b^c. It is evident that in this case also, 
the position of the words might be varied at pleasure with- 
out affecting the sense. Or, to come at once to the actual 
fact, as it exists in many languages, let ns agree that the 
nominative case of all nouns of the masculine gender shall 
end in the syllable -us, which will then be equivalent to 
one in the numeral notation ; the third person singular of the 
past tense of active verbs shall end in the syllable -it, which 
will correspond to number two ; and the objective shall ter- 
minate in the syllable -um, answering to three. This would 
in fact be the Latin system, except that there is a greater va- 
riety of latin endings than thoee I lave mentioned. The 
terminations here answer the same purpose as the numbers, 
and it is plain that the order of the words in the period be- 
comes grammatically indifferent : 

Gulielmus percuss it Petrum, 
Gulielmus Petrum percuss it, 
Petrum percuss it Gulielmus, 
Petrum Gulielmus percuss it, 
Percuss it Gulielmus Petrum, 
Percuss it Petrum Gulielmus, 

all being equally clear, and all meaning the same thing. 
"While therefore this simple phrase admits of but one arrange- 
ment in English, the Latin syntax allows half a dozen, all 
equally unequivocal in meaning. 

Every Latin verb has numerous terminations, each of 
which indicates whether the action expressed by it is past, 
present or future, whether its subject is singular or plural, 
and whether it is in the first, second or third person. Every 



LATIN INFLECTIONS. 345 

noun has several terminations, each of which determines its 
case, nominative, genitive, (possessive.) and dative, accusative 
or ablative, (objective,) and the like, its number, and gen- 
erally also its gender. Every adjective has many endings, 
each of which denotes the same accidents as those of the 
noun. In many instances, the endings of the noun and ad- 
jective indicative of case, number and gender are the same 
in both classes of words ; in others, they are different, but 
whether like or unlike, they, and those of the verb also, cor- 
respond to each other, so that when the forms are once thor- 
oughly mastered, it is in general easy to decide, by the ter- 
minations alone, without reference to position, to what noun 
a particular adjective belongs, and Avhat are the relations be- 
tween the noun and the verb. Hence, in English, the form 
determines little, the position much ; in Latin, the relative 
importance of the two conditions is reversed, and, compar- 
atively speaking, order is nothing, form is every thing. The 
Latins could employ foreign names or other words, only by 
clipping or stretching them to their own standard, and not 
only conforming them to their orthoepy, but to their syntax 
also. Accordingly, the Celtic, Teutonic and other barbarous 
common and proper nouns, which occur so often in Roman 
history, are so much disfigured by changes in the radical 
combinations of letters, and especially in their characteristic 
terminations, that it is difficult to detect their original ele- 
ments, and they aid us little in discovering the forms which 
marked the non-Roman dialects of those periods. The mod- 
ern writers of the sixteenth century — a period when the 
European languages were little studied out of their native 
territory — resorted to Latin as a means of communication, 
whenever they wished to make themselves understood beyond 



34:6 MODEKN LATIN. 

the limits of their respective countries, and the rigid syntax 
of that language compelled them to perform similar operations 
on the modern names which they introduced into their writ- 
ings. The historian de Thou, or Thuanus, as he called him- 
self, Latinized the names of his personages in so strange a 
fashion that, to follow him, one must know not only the in« 
flections, but the etymology, both of the Latin and of the 
modern languages to which these names belong. Thus the 
French family name Entraigues, etymologically, entre les 
aigues, (aigues being an old form for eaux, waters,) 
and meaning belween-t7ie-waters, is, for the convenience of 
declension, converted into Interamnas, a Latin form, of 
corresponding etymology. The native name of the celebrated 
Erasmus was Gheraerd Gheraerds. The root of Gheraerd is 
a verb signifying to desire, but the name was very repug- 
nant to Roman orthography and syntax, and the great scholar 
Latinized his prenomen into Desiderius, and Grsecized 
his surname into Erasmus, both signifying the same thing. 
In like manner, the literary name of the Reformer Melaneh- 
thon is a translation of the German Schwarzerde, or 
Blackearth, and that of Oecolampadius is a Greek version of 
his German family appellative, Hausschein.* 

But to return : From what has been said of the struc- 
ture of the Latin, as compared with that of the English 
period, it is obvious that the analysis to which a proposition is 
subjected in the mind of the listener, is conducted by very 



* Bolton, in his Hypercritica, (HaslewoocTs Collection, II. 252,) says: "In 
this fine and meer schoolish folly, after that, George Buchanan is often taken ; 
not without casting his reader into obscurity. For in his histories, where he 
gpeaketh of one Wisehart, so little was his ear able to brook the name, as that, 
translating the sense thereof into Greek, of Wisehart comes forth unfo us So* 
rnoCARDius." See App. 51. 



VALUE OF LATIN GRAMMAR. 347 

different processes in Latin and English. In the English sen- 
tence, the proportion of words whose form fixes their gram- 
matical category is too small to serve as a guide to the mean- 
ing. The logical relations must first be determined, and the 
syntactical relations inferred from them. In Latin, on the 
contrary, you first, so to speak, spell out the syntax, and 
thence infer the sense of the period. In other words, to 
parse an English sentence, you must first understand it ; to 
understand a Latin period, you must first parse it. And in 
this predominance of the formal over the logical lies the ex- 
ceeding value of the Latin as a grammatical discipline — not 
as a necessary means of comprehending or using our own 
tongue — but as a universal key to all language, a general 
type of comparison whereby to try all other modes of human 
speech. 

The English student who has mastered the Latin may be 
assured, that he has thereby learned one half of what he has 
to learn in acquiring any Continental language. The thor- 
ough comprehension of this one syntax has stored his mind, 
once for all, with linguistic principles, of general application, 
which, without this study, must be acquired over again, in 
the shape of independent concrete facts, with every new lan- 
guage he commences. The Latin syntax, in fact, embraces 
and typifies all the rest ; and he who possesses himself of it, 
as a preliminary to varied linguistic attainment and research, 
will have made a preparation analogous to that of the natu- 
ralist, who familiarizes himself with the scientific classifica- 
tion and nomenclature of the study he pursues, by the criti- 
cal study of some perfectly organized type, before he at- 
tempts to investigate the characteristics of inferior species. 

An important advantage of a positional and auxiliary, 
over a flectional, syntax, is that the chances of grammatical 



348 ADVANTAGES OF I3INFLECTED LANGUAGES. 

error are diminished in about the same proportion as the 
number of forms is reduced, and, accordingly, we observe 
that the mistakes of bad speakers in English are never in the 
way of position, not often in particles or auxiliaries, but al- 
most uniformly in the right employment of inflections, such 
as the use of the singular verb with a plural noun, the con- 
founding of the preterite with the past participle, or the em- 
ployment of the strong inflection for the weak, or the weak 
for the strong. The double system of conjugation in our 
verbs, that with the letter-change, and that by augmentation, 
is a fertile source of blunders, not only with children, but 
with older persons ; and for want of that particular exercise, 
our Anglican memories are so little retentive of forms, that 
even distinguished writers are sometimes convicted of grave 
trausgressions in accidence.* 

Inflected languages have an important advantage over 
those whose words are invariable, in their greater freedom 
from equivocation. In a perfect inflected grammar, in a sys- 
tem where, for instance, the forms of the genders and cases 
of nouns, adjectives, articles and pronouns, should be so 
varied that no single ending could be used in different con 
nections, or for different purposes ; where the distinctions of 
number, person, mood, tense and condition, in the verbs, 
should have each its appropriate and exclusive form ; and 

* I noticed in the lust lecture the confusion between the causative forms to fell, 
to lay, to set, and their respective simple verbs fall, lie, and sit, but almost all 
verbs with the strong inflection are subject to erroneous conjugation, especially 
if the preterite and past participle differ from each other, as well as from the 
indicative present. The verbs to go and to see are particularly unlucky in the 
treatment they receive. Had went is very often heard from ignorant persons, 
and I have .known a gentleman in an important station in public life, a close per- 
sonal and political friend of an American chief magistrate, who often prefaced hia 
confidential explanations of his votes, by saying, " I have sawed Mr. Blank thil 
morning, and heard so and so from him." 



EQUIVOCAL CONSTRUCTIONS. 3i9 

where the rules of verbal and prepositional regimen should be 
uniform and without exception ; in such a system, the mean- 
ing of an author might be obscure from profoundness of 
thought, or vague from the indefiniteness of the vocabulary, 
but it could hardly be equivocal. The passages in classic 
authors where either one of two meanings is, grammatically 
speaking, equally probable, are not very numerous, and 
where they actually occur, it usually arises from neglecting 
the inflectional, and employing a simpler, construction, or 
from the fact that one inflection is obliged to serve for more 
than one purpose. In the illustration just used, I showed 
that the relative positions of the nominative and the objec- 
tive were indifferent in Latin ; both might follow the verb, 
both might precede it, the nominative might go before and 
the objective after, as in English, or the direct contrary ; 
Gulielmus Petrum percussit, in the order nomina- 
tive, objective, verb, being just as clear and unequivocal as 
when the objective follows the verb. We have in English a 
remarkable construction, borrowed, probably, from the Latin, 
by which, in a dependent proposition, the objective with the 
infinitive is put for the nominative with a finite verb. Thus, 
" I think him to be a man of talents," instead of " I think 
that he is a man of talents." Now, awkward as this is, its 
meaning is perfectly unequivocal. The Greeks and the Latins 
employed the same form, but much more extensively, and 
by no means with the infinitive of neuter verbs alone, as to 
be, and the like, but with active or transitive verbs, which 
themselves took and governed another objective or accusa- 
tive.* This is one of the cases where a departure from gen- 



* We find, in early English, examples of the objective before other infini* 
tives than that of the substantive verb. Thus, in Genesis XXXVII. 7, oldei 



350 EQUIVOCAL CONSTRUCTIONS. 

eral syntactical principles may produce an uncertainty of 
meaning. When Pyrrhus consulted the oracle as to the re- 
sult of his meditated war with Home, the reply was, " I de- 
clare you, O Pyrrhus, the Romans to be able to conquer ! " 
Now in Greek and Latin, as we have said, there was no rule 
of position requiring the objective to follow the verb which 
governed it, and it was therefore doubtful whether the oracle 
meant, " I declare you to be able to conquer the Romans," 
or, " I declare the Romans to be able to conquer you." 

In English, on the other hand, so much depends on posi- 
tion, and the possible varieties of position between two logi- 
cally connected words are so many, that it is often extremely 
difficult to frame a long sentence, where it shall not be gram- 
matically uncertain to which of two or three subjects or an- 
tecedents a predicate or relative belongs. Hence, we are 
continually driven to turn from the dead letter to the living 
thought, to project ourselves into the mind of the author, in 
order to determine the grammatical connection of his words ; 
to divine his special meaning from the general tenor of his 
discourse, rather than to infer it from his syntax. Of all 
English writers, Spenser shows himself most independent of 
the laws of position. He disregards altogether the common 
grammatical rule of referring the relative to the last antece- 
dent, and trusts entirely to the sagacity of the reader to de- 
tect the who in the multitude of lies and shes that go before 
it.* Apart from the point of equivocation, which does not 



Wycliffite version : " I wenede vs to bynden hondfullis in the feelde, and myn 
hondful as to ryse." The modern construction, "I saw him go," and the like, 
is not an analogous form, but of a different origin. 

* The description of the combat between Sir Guyon and Pyrochles, in Canto 
XL, book I., of the Faerie Queene, is a characteristic example of this gramma* 
deal confusion. 



EQUIVOCAL CONSTRUCTIONS. 351 

often create any real logical difficulty in comprehending an 
author, however much we may be embarrassed in parsing 
him, I do not think that, with respect to precision of expres- 
sion, or the nice discrimination of delicate distinctions of 
thought and shades of sentiment, inflected languages have 
any advantage. These qualities of speech are independent 
of grammatical form. They are determined by the inherent 
expressiveness of individual words, far more than by their 
syntactical relations, and it would be difficult to produce an 
example of a subtlety of thought expressible by inflection, 
which could not be conveyed with equal precision and cer- 
tainty, by proper uninfected words with the aid of particles 
and auxiliaries.* 

Fixedness of position is an essential quality of syntax in 
-anguages where grammatical relations are not determined 
by inflection, because position only can indicate the relation 
between a given word, and those with which it is connected 
by particles and auxiliaries. 

* Doubtless habuissemis a more elegant and convenient form than 1 
might, could, would, or shoidd-have-had, which grammars give as its equivalents, 
but our varieties of expression, awkward as they are, more than compensate us, 
by their distinctions of meaning, for the simplicity of the one word, which the 
Roman used for so many. Fontenelle said : *' Si je recommencais la vie, je 
ferais tout ce que j'ai fait." Did he mean I would do, or I should do? In all 
such cases, the context, or the circumstances under which the words were 
spoken, must be called in to decide. In English, the auxiliary determines the 
sense. 

The office of verbal inflections is to express qualified and conditioned, rather 
than complex, thought. The difficulty of comprehending an idea, or of express- 
ing it in any language with a reasonably copious vocabulary, does not lie in its 
conditions, or even in its complexity, but is proportioned to its subtlety, and 
what Browne calls its elementarily. So long as we can separate from the radi- 
cal conception the qualifications and combinations accidental to it, we can 
readily express those qualifications and combinations by auxiliary or other sub- 
ordinate forms. In thought and in language, so far as decomposition is prac- 
ticable, comprehension and expression are easy, but, as in chemistry, where 
analysis ends, there mystery begins. 



.352 OEDEK OF THOUGHT. 

But though the position of words must be a fixed one j 
yet it does not necessarily follow the natural order of thought 
in any given case, but may be entirely independent of logical 
sequence, and of course arbitrary. Of this, there are numer- 
ous examples in English. Except when we depart from the 
idiom of the language, by poetic or rhetorical license, we 
must place first, the subject, then the copula or predicate 
verb, and then the object, as, for example, "William struck 
Peter, William being the subject or agent, struck the verb, 
Peter the object or sufferer. ]S T ow, this may be the logical 
order of thought, or it may not, according to circumstances, 
but nevertheless the law of position in English is inflexible. 
If, for example, the words just supposed are uttered in reply 
to the question, Who struck Peter? then the grammatical 
rule and the logical order of arrangement coincide, inasmuch 
as the personality of the agent would first suggest itself to 
the respondent. But had the question been, Whom did Wil- 
liam strike? it is equally clear that the name of the object, 
JPeter, would first rise in the mind, and logically should be 
first expressed by the lips. So had it been asked, What did 
"William do to Peter ? the thought and word struck logically 
would, and grammatically should, take precedence. It is easy 
to imagine that, without any question put, circumstances 
may make first and most prominent in the mind of the 
speaker, either the subject, the predicate or the object, and it 
is a most important convenience to him to be able to observe 
what, in the particular case, is the natural order of thought.* 



* In discussions upon the relations between the logical order of thought and 
the syntactical succession of words, it has been sometimes assumed, and at 
other times argued, that we are to inquire into the construction of the proposi- 
tion as abstracted from all circumstances which might affect the order of thought 
and expression in the mind of either speaker or hearer. This is to suppose a 



ORDER OF THOUGHT. 353 

In inflected languages, this may very generally be done, in- 
asmuch as the form of every word indicates with certainty its 
grammatical case. 

case which, in articulate or written language, cannot exist, and in point of fact 
seldom, if ever, does exist in purely intellectual processes. No man speaks 
or writes without a motive, and that motive originates in circumstances that 
necessarily modify the order in which thought rises to the mind, and words to 
the lips or pen. 

We know language only in its concrete form, and the grammatical and philo- 
logical question always is, What is the order of thought under such or such cir- 
cumstances? The rhetorical question is still more complicated: How am I, 
under the circumstances special to me, to arrange my words, that they may pro- 
duce the right impression on the mind or heart of my hearer under the circum- 
stances that are operating on him? This, indeed, is purely a matter of art, and 
belongs as little to philology, as do metaphysical inquiries into the abstract laws 
of thought. Men are usually so much under the control of subjective emotion 
that they utter their words without calculating their effect beforehand, and they 
habitually arrange them according to the syntactical laws of the language they 
are speaking, by a process which long practice has rendered mechanical and un- 
conscious. The circumstances which affect the order of thought in an inde- 
pendent proposition, uttered not as a reply to a question, nor with any reference 
to the conditions peculiar to the person addressed, are too various even to admit 
of generalization or classification. An example or two must suffice. To take 
the proposition I have so often employed as an illustration, William struck 
Peter. If we suppose Peter, as a son or relative, to be invested with special 
interest in the eyes of the speaker, and William to be comparatively a stranger, 
the name, as the representative of the personality of Peter, would be first in 
the order of thought, and in languages where, as in Latin, expression is free to 
conform to the thought, first in the order of words also. Hence the natural 
arrangement of the proposition woi'ld be : Peter [objective] struck William 
[nominative]. 

The order of thought and speech would be the same, if the action were re- 
versed, and Peter were the agent, William the sufferer. Again, if the blow were 
a very severe one, the character of the act would be most prominent in the 
mind of the speaker, and the order of expression would be : struck Peter [ob- 
jective] William [nominative]. In general, it may be said that the relative em- 
phasis with which the different words composing a proposition are uttered, if it 
could be exactly measured, would serve as a guide to the place of the words hi 
the logical order of succession, the most emphatic words coming first. 

In inaiiy languages, the order of arrangement is inverted, or at least changed, 
in interrogative sentences.- In others, interrogative pronouns, particles, or aux- 
iliary verbal forms, very often serve to put the question independently of the 
order of the words. Among the great European tongues, the Italian is less bound 
to a fixed sequence in interrogative sentences than any other. 
23 



354 COLLOCATION OF WORDS. 

It is obvious that the power of arranging Lie period at will; 
of always placing at the most conspicuous point, the promi- 
nent word, the key-note of the emotion we seek to excite, is 
a logical and rhetorical advantage of the greatest moment. 
If no such motive of position exists, the speaker may consult 
the laws of euphonic sequence, or metrical convenience, and 
order his words in such succession of articulate sounds as falls 
most agreeably upon the ear. Accordingly, in languages 
which have this flexibility of structure, we observe that ora- 
tors, when they would rouse the passions of their audience, 
arrange their periods so as to give to the emphatic words the 
most effective positions ; when, on the contrary, they would 
soothe the minds, or allay the irritation of their hearers, they 
seek a flowing and melodious collocation of sounds, or sink 
words suggestive of offence, by placing them in unemphatic 
parts of the sentence. Thus, to a certain extent, in these 
tongues, a speaker might accomplish by mere collocation 
what in others he must effect by selection, and, with the same 
words, he might frame a sentence which would excite the in- 
dignation of his audience, and another which, while commu- 
nicating precisely the same fact, should, by making a differ- 
ent element prominent in the order of utterance, be received 
with little emotion. For the complete illustration of what I 
have been saying it would be necessary to resort to more of 
Greek and Latin quotation than would be appropriate, but 
classical scholars will find in those literatures many examples 
of great skill in ordering words with reference to effect. De- 
mosthenes, in particular, exhibits consummate dexterity in 
this art. At his pleasure, he separates his lightning and hia 
thunder by an interval that allows his hearer half to forget 
the coming detonation, or he instantaneously follows up the 



COLLOCATION OF WZRDS. 355 

dazzling flash witli a pealing explosion, that stuns, prostrates, 
and crushes the stoutest opponent. 

English poetry, and that of the highest character, is full 
of instances where the rhetoric has overpowered the gram- 
mar, and the poet has availed himself of what is called 
poetic license, to place his words in such order as to give 
them their best effect, without regard to the rigid rules of 
our obstinate syntax. Take, for example, this couplet from 
Byron's Adieu : 

The night winds sigh, the breakers roar, 
And shrieks the wild sea-mew. 

Here the last line is far more effective than it would have 
been, if the nominative had preceded the verb : 

The wild sea-mew shrieks. 

In the first line, no such change of position was required in 
either member, because the nouns wind and breakers are of 
themselves suggestive of the sounds which belong to them, 
whereas form and power of flight are the ideas which most 
naturally couple themselves with the name of the bird. So, 
in King Lear : 

Such bursts of horrid thunder, 
Such groans of roaring wind and rain I never 
Kemember to have heard ! 

Here the force of the passage would have been much weak- 
ened by following the rule of placing the objective after the 
verb : 

I never remember to have heard such bursts of thunder, &c 

And in Samuel : 

Nabal is his name, and folly is with him, 



356 COLLOCATION OF WORDS. 

is far more forcible to those who ki ow that the name Nabal 
means a fool, than if the nsual order, his name is Nabal, had 
been observed ; Fool is his name, and folly is with him, than, 
His name is fool, and folly is with him. So, in Jacob's reply 
to Pharaoh, the shortness and emptiness of human life are 
more strikingly expressed by the phrase : " Few and evil have 
the days of the years of my life been," than by the more fa- 
miliar English arrangement of the same words. 

It was not for reasons of metrical convenience, but from 
a deep knowledge of the laws of thought, that, in announcing 
the argument of his great epic, Milton enumerates the several 
branches of the subject in a dependent form, before he intro- 
duces the comparatively insignificant governing verb, which 
does not appear till the sixth line of the introductory invo- 
cation : 

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world and all our woe, 
With loss of Eden, till one greater man 
Kestore us, and regain the blissful seat, 
Sing Heavenly Muse, &c. 

Here the whole great drama, in its successive scenes, man's 
first sin, its consequences temporal and spiritual, his redemp- 
tion by Christ and final salvation, is brought before us at 
once in all its majesty, weakened by no tame conventionali- 
ties of introduction. 

The Anglo-Saxon, although its original variety of inflec- 
tion had been greatly reduced before the date of its most 
flourishing literature, still retained a good deal of freedom of 
collocation. The Anglo-Saxon version of the New Testa 
ment generally follows its original in the order of its syntax, 
and early English writers employed, in prose at least, greater 



SYNTAX OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES. d57 

liberty ol position than is now practised. It is an interesting 
observation, that the modern Italian has inherited from its 
Latin mother a great freedom of periodic arrangement, 
though, with a marked inferiority in power of inflection. It 
has an immense advantage over the French, in variety of 
admissible collocations of words in a given sentence, as well 
as in the greater number of allied forms of expression. The 
French inflections, indeed, as has been before observed, are 
much less complicated and complete to the ear than to the 
eye ; and if we strip the accidence of the flectional syllables 
or letters which in the spoken tongue are silent, the distinct 
variations in the forms of words are far fewer than they ap- 
pear in the written language. But the difference between 
French and Italian in flexibility of syntax does not depend 
upon this circumstance alone, for Italian has nearly as great 
a superiority in liberty of syntactical order over the Spanish, 
which possesses full and distinctly marked inflections. The 
freedom of the Italian syntax is to be ascribed in part to the 
fact that it is both an aboriginal and, to a great extent, an 
unmixed tongue, spoken by the descendants of those to whom 
the maternal Latin was native, and retaining the radical 
forms and grammatical capabilities of that language, whereas 
French and Spanish are strangers to the soil, corrupted by a 
large infusion of foreign ingredients, and spoken by nations 
alien in descent from those who employed the common source 
of both, as their mother-tongue. The wretched servitude, 
under which Italy has for centuries alternately struggled and 
slumbered, has prevented the free employment of its lan- 
guage on such themes as to bring out fully its great capaci- 
ties, and make it known to intellectual Europe as an intel- 
lectual speech; but its many-sidedness and catholicity of ex 



358 SYNTAX OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES. 

pression, its rhetorical facility of presenting a thought in so 
many different aspects, render it valuable as a linguistic 
study, independently of the claims of its literature. 

In general it may be said, that in inflected languages, the 
point of view in which the subject presents itself to the mind 
of the speaker, is the determining principle of the collocation 
of words in periods, but at the same time, they allow such 
an arrangement as to enable the speaker to suit the structure 
of the sentence to the supposed condition of the mind of the 
hearer, or the impression which he wishes to produce upon 
him. The natural order in which thought develops itself in 
the mind of one already cognizant of the facts, agitated with 
the emotion, or possessed of the conclusions which he wishes 
to communicate to another, is not by any means necessarily 
that which would be most readily intelligible to a mind ig- 
norant of the facts, or most impressive to one intellectually 
or morally otherwise affected towards the subject. Hence 
the power of diversified arrangement of words in inflected 
languages is valuable, not merely because it permits a speaker 
to follow what is to him a logical order of sequence, but be- 
cause a master of language, who knows the human heart 
also, may thereby accommodate the forms of his speech to the 
endless variety of characters, conditions, passions and intelli- 
gences, of which our discordant humanity is made up. 

There is another point which must not be overlooked. 
An inflected language, with periods compacted of words knit 
each to each in unbroken succession, is eminently favorable 
to continuity of thought. A parenthetical qualification inter- 
rupts the chain of discourse much less abruptly, if it is syn- 
tactically connected with the period, than if it is, as is usual 
in English, interjectionally thrown in. It is said to be one 



COLLOCATION OF WORDS. 359 

of the tests of a perfect style, that you cannot change, omit, 
or even transpose, a word in a period, without weakening or 
perverting the meaning of the author. Although this may 
be true of English, I do not think it by any means applicable 
to inflected languages like the Greek or Latin, so far at least 
as the order of words is concerned, for there seem to be many 
constructions in which position is not only grammatically, but 
logically and rhetorically, indifferent. In the rough draft 
of one of Plato's works, the first few words were written by 
way of experiment in half a dozen different arrangements, 
and the famous stanza in the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, 
descriptive of a storm at sea : 

Stendon le nubi un tenebroso velo, &c. 

is said to have been composed by the poet in ten times as 
many forms. Doubtless, in such a wide variety of sequences, 
there were some discoverable differences of meaning ; but 
in the main, both the philosopher and the poet were aiming 
in all this nicety at a sensuous, as much as at an intellectual 
effect upon the reader, however logically important a partic- 
ular succession of words may have been in other passages of 
their writings. 



LECTURE XVII. 

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS. 

III. 

It is a remarkable fact that the modern languages known 
in literature are, perhaps without exception, poorer in gram- 
matical inflections than the ancient tongues from which they 
are respectively derived ; and that, consequently, the syntac- 
tical relations of important words are made to depend much 
more on auxiliaries, determinative particles and position. In 
fact, the change in this respect is so great as to have given a 
new linguistic character to the tongues which now constitute 
the speech of civilized man. I alluded on a former occasion 
to a doctrine advanced by very eminent philologists, that 
grammatical structure is a surer test of linguistic affinity than 
comparison of vocabularies. But though this doctrine, as 
limited and understood by the ablest linguists, is true in its 
application to the primary distinctions between great classes 
of languages, as, for example, the Semitic and Indo-Eu- 
ropean ; yet it properly relates to remote and generic, not 
specific affinities, and is not capable of such extension as to be 
of much practical value in comparing the mixed and deriva 



GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS. 361 

tive languages of Europe with those from which they are im- 
mediately descended 

We know, with historical certainty, that what are called 
the Romance languages, and their many local dialects, are 
derived from the Latin ; but what coincidence of syntactical 
structure do we find between them and the common mother 
of them all ? The Italian resembles the Latin in independ- 
ence of fixed laws of periodic arrangement, but here the 
grammatical likeness ends, and if we apply that test alone, 
it would be quite as easy to make out a linguistic affinity 
between the Italian and the Greek, as between the Italian 
and the Latin, The Latin has no article, definite or indefi- 
nite ; its noun, adjective, pronoun and participle, have not 
only the distinction of number, but of three genders also, 
and a full system of inflected cases ; its adjectives admit of 
degrees of comparison ; and its verbs have a passive voice. 
The Italian, on the contrary, has two articles ; its nouns, ad- 
jectives, pronouns and participles, though varied for number, 
have no distinction of case ; its adjectives are compared only 
by the aid of particles ; it has no neuter gender, and its 
verbs are without a passive voice. All this is true, also, of 
the Spanish, French and Portuguese. These diversities of 
grammar would have been held to disprove a linguistic rela- 
tionship between the Latin and its descendants, were not 
such relationship established both by identity of vocabulary 
and by positive historical evidence. So, with respect to the 
Greek, we know that more closely literal, more exactly word- 
for-word translations, (and this is certainly one of the best 
tests of grammatical resemblance,) can be made from it into 
German, than into any of the languages of Southern Europe, 
which, through the Latin, are more nearly related to it. An« 



362 ANCIENT COLLOQUIAL DIALECTS. 

other fact bearing on this same question is, that the points of 
syntactical structure or general grammar, in which the 
modern languages of Southern and South-eastern Europe 
approach each other most closely, are just those in which 
they least resemble the Latin and the ancient Greek, from 
which they are respectively derived ; and therefore, in spite 
of their diversity of origin, and their discrepancies of vocab- 
ulary and syntax, they must have been influenced by power- 
ful common tendencies. 

The general resemblance between the languages of mod- 
ern Europe, in points where they differ from the grammar of 
Greek and Latin as exhibited in classical literature, is not a 
matter of obvious explanation. It has been maintained that 
the popular colloquial speech of ancient Greece and Rome, 
and especially the vulgar and rural dialects of both, differed 
widely from the written languages, and nearly approximated 
to the modern spoken tongues which represent them. The 
supposed resemblance between ancient colloquial Greek and 
modern Romaic, between ancient colloquial Latin, or the 
rustic dialects, and modern Italian, is an extremely interest- 
ing and curious subject, and it has been at least made out 
that many forms in the two modern dialects, hitherto sup- 
posed to be recent corruptions, are really of a very early 
date, but to assume that those dialects are merely the popular 
speech of Athens and of Rome, would be to claim for them 
an immutability, a persistence of character, which is at vari- 
ance with what observation teaches us is the inevitable law 
of all language, and, moreover, with what historical evidence 
proves as to successive changes in the very tongues in ques- 
tion. Modern Italian has divided itself into at least a score 
of clearly marked distinct dialects, and but few of the char- 



ITALIAN DIALECTS. 363 

acteristxc peculiarities of these can be traced to any ancient 
source. The differences between them, in point of vocabu- 
lary, seem to depend very much on the special extraneous 
influences to which the localities where they are spoken have 
been exposed ; but with regard to their very wide diversities 
in inflection, in syntax, and in pronunciation, although the 
same influences have doubtless been active in producing 
them, yet it is very difficult to trace the relation between the 
cause and the effect. Disregarding relatively unimportant 
exceptions, the most general classification we can make of 
these dialects is into those with full, and those with meagre 
inflections. The northern dialects, those spoken in the prov- 
inces most subject to invasion by, and commixture with, un-ul- 
lied races, have usually the fewest inflections ; those of south- 
ern Italy, on the contrary, where the population is mora 
homogeneous, or where the mingling of races dates further 
back, are generally more fully inflected. 

Perhaps the most interesting linguistic fact connected 
with the transition from an inflectional and independent, to 
a positional and auxiliary, grammatical structure, is that in 
the latter condition of syntax, the radical forms, which had 
been buried and almost lost in inflected and derivative 
words, are revived, and again employed in what we must 
suppose to be very near approximations to the earliest shape 
in which they existed as articulate words. There are many 
examples of this in the dialects of northern Italy, and those 
which occur in every sentence of modern French are perhaps 
even more striking. Homme, f e m m e , an, b o n , are not 
to be considered as either derivatives or corruptions of the 
Latin homo, femina, annus, bonus. They are simply 
the radicals, the true words, restored to their pristine integ- 
rity by rejecting the accidental changes which inflection has 



364 RETURN OF RADICAL FORMS. 

produced ; for few linguistic inquirers doubt that the Latlnd 
said liom, fern, an, bon, before they said he m o, f e m - 
ina, annus, bonus.* 

It is a received theory among English, and pretty gen- 
erally among Continental philologists, that modern languages 
are 5 not accidentally but essentially, and by virtue of some 
universal law of mutation, distinguished from ancient ones 
by greater simplicity of grammatical form. The doctrine, 
as stated by Latham, is, that — 

1. The earlier the stage of a given language is, the greater 
the amount of its inflectional forms, and the converse. 

2. As languages become modern, they substitute preposi- 
tions and auxiliaries for cases and tenses. 

3. The amount of inflection is in the inverse proportion 
to the amount of prepositions and auxiliary verbs. 

4. In the course of time languages drop their inflections, 
and substitute circumlocutions by means of prepositions, &c. 
The reverse never takes place. 

It is obvious that the last three of these propositions are 
little more than repetitions, or rather specifications of the 
first, and equally evident that the first, in the form put by 
our author, is untrue. That all languages which have been 



* In the return of words to their primitive forms, we have an evidence of 
the organic nature of language, but the law of persistence, change and rever- 
sion is not the same in the word as in the plant or animal. The successive gen- 
erations of the vegetable or the animated creature are identical in their char- 
acteristics, so long as the external conditions in which they live are constant ; 
these characteristics change when the influential circumstances of the propaga- 
tion and growth of the particular organism are changed; and when disturbing or 
abnormal causes cease to operate, the plant or the animal returns to the typical 
form. The word, on the other hand, invariably, if not normally, undergoes 
successive mutations under the same continuing conditions, and disturbing in- 
fluences do not accelerate its divergence, but bring :fc back to its original type. 
See Lecture XII. 



HISTORY OF INFLECTIONS. 365 

reduced to writing have thereafter tended to nectioi al sim- 
plification is undisputed, but no genetic theory of the origin 
of inflections has ever been proposed, which did not directly 
contradict the general proposition enunciated by Latham. 
All these theories suppose either an organic evolution of in- 
flected from simple forms, or a coalescence of different parts 
of speech into single words, and of course, in every lan- 
guage, an " earlier stage " than that in which the inflections 
were fully developed. If Latham's doctrine were true, we 
should be driven to the conclusion that such forms as the 
Latin subjunctive pluperfect habuissetis, and the Greek 
ifiefiovXeviA-eda, were not agglutinate or derivative, but 
either primitive or preceded by still more complicated inflec- 
tions. We should thus be compelled to believe that lan- 
guage was a thing, not of development and growth, but, in 
its most perfected form, a possession of primeval man, and 
that all subsequent changes were but corruptions. I men- 
tioned in a former lecture several instances where the forma- 
tion of new inflections in very modern times was matter of 
historical certainty. The list might easily have been in- 
creased, and, though we cannot positively show the mode of 
development of the whole modern conjugation of a Romance 
verb, and though some of the forms are undoubtedly mere 
corruptions of ancient inflections, and others, at present, quite 
inexplicable, yet the cases are very numerous where we have 
the strongest evidence that conjugations and declensions have 
arisen in very recent times, by processes precisely analogous 
to those which in the infancy of man produced them. It is 
obvious, then, that in the present state of our knowledge, we 
find no ground for the assumption of such a change in the 
constitution of the human mind, for it is nothing less, aa 
Latham's broad propositions involve. We can assign proba- 



366 UNWRITTEN LANGUAGES. 

ble reasons for linguistic changes, so far as change exists, 
without any such violent supposition, and it is far safer to 
confine ourselves to the statement of a philological fact com 
mon to a large class of languages, than to announce hypo 
thetical propositions as laws embracing all human speech. 

The languages of savages never reduced to writing, and 
of many nations among whom literature is little diffused, are 
astonishingly complex and multifarious in their inflections, 
and as, for the want of recorded monuments, researches into 
their past history are impossible, we can have no warrant 
whatever for saying, either that such languages are in a very 
early stage of existence, or that their structure is less compli- 
cated than it was at some previous period. 

If we compare existing unwritten with written languages, 
and both with what we know of their history, we shall, I think, 
conclude that, in general, the process of flectional development 
and agglutination goes on, and the forms become more and 
more complicated, until the language is reduced to writing, 
and a literature is created. At this period the formation of 
new inflections is arrested, and the tendency thereafter is to 
simplification in form, increase of substance or vocabulary, 
and discrimination in signification ; so that if a language 
adopts a written character at an early stage of its growth, it 
will be less complicated in its grammatical structure than if 
it exists only in a spoken form until a late period. 

With respect to the modern tendency of written languages 
to simplification of form, there are two causes almost univer- 
sal in their operation, which have not generally been suffi- 
ciently considered in their bearing on this particular point. 
These are foreign conquest, accompanied by the intermixture 
of a strange population with the native race, and the equally 
universal introduction of new religions by alien teachers. 



EFFECTS OF CONQUEST. 367 

Although we cannot always specify the precise mode of ope> 
ration of these transforming causes, yet they seem to me of 
themselves sufficient to have produced quite as great linguis- 
tic revolutions as we have witnessed in the speech of Europe, 
and indeed it is rather surprising that so much, than that so 
little, of the ancient tongues of Latium and Hellas yet ex- 
ists in a recognizable form. 

I have stated it on a former occasion as a generally ver- 
ified fact, that in the case of the subjugation of a civilized, 
by a barbarian or a less numerous race, the native speech 
is adopted by the conquerors. 

How then would a given language probably be modified, 
by becoming the organ of communication between foreign 
masters or teachers, and their subjects or pupils ? We learn 
the vocabulary of another language readily, its grammatical 
inflections and phraseological combinations, with infinite 
difficulty. "While therefore conquerors and missionaries 
would soon acquire radicals enough to make themselves 
intelligible, they would slowly, if ever, master the compli- 
cated forms of a foreign speech. Their commanding position 
would give authority even to their imperfect dialect, and es- 
pecially if they were, as at least the missionary almost uni- 
versally would be, intellectually superior to the subject race, 
their mutilated inflections and foreign idioms, bearing the 
stamp of both physical and mental power and dignity, would 
become characteristics of elevated and refined speech, and 
eooner or later supersede the more complicated grammatical 
machinery of the native tongue. To these influences would 
be added others of a similar character, derived from the new 
commercial relations to which conquest usually gives birth, 
and thus while the vocabulary might remain comparatively 
unchanged, the formal characteristics of the syntax might un- 



368 EFFECTS OF CONQUEST. 

dergo an almost total revolution. There are few countries 
of Europe, few of civilized Asia, whose languages have not 
been modified and accommodated to the convenience of stran- 
gers, by such causes as I have described, and it would be 
difficult if not impossible to find a written speech which has 
remained wholly exempt from their action. Although, then, 
we can undoubtedly perceive that in these latter ages of general 
intercommunion, all human speech is exposed to certain exter- 
nal influences of a universal character, we are not in posses- 
sion of facts which authorize us to say, that there exists at 
the present day any inherent common tendency of language 
in either direction, and it is idle to speculate on conjectural 
causes for an unascertained phenomenon. No European lan- 
guage, perhaps I may say no tongue possessing a literature, 
has been so little exposed to the influences of which I have 
spoken for the last eight hundred years, as the Icelandic, and 
a comparison of this language, in its present form, with the 
Swedish and Danish, which, in the eleventh century, if not 
later, were identical with it, is instructive in reference to the 
point under consideration. Sweden, Norway and Denmark 
have not been devastated by conquest, nor has there been any 
large admixture of foreign with the native blood ; but to 
all alien influences, except those of violence, they have been 
much exposed, and the consequence has been, that while the 
Icelandic has remained comparatively unchanged, the Swed- 
ish and Danish have been almost completely revolutionized, 
hi every thing but the roots of their vocabularies, and in these 
there has been a very great infusion of foreign material. In 
this instance the difference must be ascribed, not to any in- 
herent tendency towards simplification of structure, but to 
external causes, and therefore in this, the best existing test 
case, we find little support for the theory in question. 



ROMANCE DIALECTS. 369 

The countries composing the Koman Empire have been 
especially exposed to every conceivable canse and modii of 
linguistic corruption. We must not forget that the rural 
population of Italy was almost extirpated by the conscription 
and by civil discord, before the commencement of our era, 
and that the place of the Koman peasantry was supplied by 
Gallic, Teutonic, Hellenic, African and Asiatic colonized sol- 
diers, and prsedial slaves, to none of whom was the Latin a 
mother-tongue. The provinces were soon overrun, separated 
from the metropolitan seat of power, partially depopulated 
and re-peopled, split up into a multitude of petty principal- 
ities and nationalities, and finally reduced into an undistin- 
guishable chaos, in which state they remained until the reign 
of Charlemagne restored western Christendom to a measure 
of light and order. The reconstruction of European society 
then commenced. There was an evident gravitation towards 
centres, a tendency to consolidation and the assimilation of 
discordant elements. The fragmentary jargons began to 
harmonize, coalesce, and form national or at least provincial 
dialects, and finally, by processes which, when better under- 
stood, will throw more light on the general history of lan- 
guage than almost any other source of instruction, the great 
internal divisions of the Gothic and Romance tongues were 
clearly established, and each became a special, well-marked, 
national idiom. 

Persons not familiar with the civil history of the middle 
ages, are generally not aware of the confusion of tongues 
which prevailed throughout Christendom as late as the begin- 
ning of the fourteenth century. The fine old Catalan chron- 
icler Ramon Muntaner, who lived at that period, and had 
extensive opportunities of observation in Europe and in Asia, 
testifies that small as were the numbers of his countrymen, 



370 KOMANCE DIAULCTS. 

yet no other one language was spoken by so many. " Fee 
will have maiwaile," says he, " of what I shall telle yon, but 
natheless, if yee marke well, yee shal finde that I telle you 
the trouthe ; that is to saine, there be nowhere so moche folke 
that speketh one same tongue as of the Catalans. For in the 
reaume of Castille, there be many provinces, and everie of 
them useth his owne proper speche. Ye shalle finde the lyke 
diversity in Fraunce, in Englonde, in Almayne, and in all 
Rumelie ; and in lykewise in thempiry of Constantinople, 
the Morea, and Vlaquie, and Natolie, and other marches, and 
it is even so with as manye other peoples ?,s bee in the 
world e. Now, some menne may bee abashed her eat, and 
wene it is but an olde wyfe's tale, but thinke what ye liste, 
wete ye wel, it is the veray trouthe." The mysterious tenacity 
with which language clings to the soil, seems to be the great 
conservative force that prevented the total annihilation of 
the Latin in the countries where the wide political sway of 
Rome had planted it. Too much of like influence has been 
ascribed to the adoption of the Latin as the language of the 
[Romish church, and it is very doubtful whether that circum- 
stance really had any very important influence in the devel- 
opment and form of the modern Romance dialects. To all 
the Romance tribes, Christianity was taught through the 
Latin, and though Augustine advises the preacher to make 
some slight concessions to popular ignorance of language, 
yet there is little cause to believe that the jargons of the Ital- 
ian, Gallic and Spanish provinces were ever much used as a 
vehicle of religious instruction. Grammatical Latin was 
sufficiently intelligible for the purposes of the priesthood, in 
all those provinces, when Christianity was established among 
them, and, once established, it was maintained by an author- 
ity that had more efficient means at its command than the 



LATIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 371 

persuasive accents of a maternal dialect. When, then, in 
the reign of Charlemagne, the Latin language was again cul- 
tivated for secular purposes, it was the classical, not the 
ecclesiastical literature of Rome that made itself felt in mod- 
ifying the spoken dialects, which were struggling up into 
recognized existence. 

"With the Gothic languages the case was quite otherwise. 
The missionary who goes armed with the cross, not with the 
sword, must use a speech intelligible to those whom he would 
convert. Charlemagne indeed made Christians by force, but 
the Gothic tribes generally were brought to Christianity by 
arguments and persuasions addressed to them by ministers 
speaking to every man in his own tongue. Hence the lan- 
guages of the Gothic stock were employed in the service of 
religion at a relatively earlier period than those of Romance 
origin, and were modified accordingly. They all have gram- 
matical peculiarities which seem repugnant to their general 
syntactical principles, and which they appear to have bor- 
rowed from the idiom of Greek or Latin works translated 
into them, or imitated by native authors, and hence in those 
languages we can often detect the influence of ecclesiastical 
Latin. The Romance dialects, on the contrary, did not ven- 
ture to trespass on themes, to the discussion of which the sa- 
cred tongue of Rome was appropriated, and their training 
and formative influences were almost wholly of a secular 
character. 

The influence of the causes of linguistic change to which 
I have alluded, was exhausted, or at least greatly weakened 
in its action, as soon as strong and stable governments were 
organized. Conservative forces now became predominant, 
and of these unquestionably the most important is the diffu- 
sion of a general taste for poetry. Poetic thought requires a 



372 INFLUENCE CF POETRY. 

certain dignity and elevation of diction inconsistent with the 
employment of trite, trivial, and especially vnlgar and abbre 
viated expressions, and in spite of the theory and practice of 
Wordsworth, its dialect will always consist of a vocabulary in 
some degree less familiar than that of prose. The standard 
authors in prose and verse, especially in early stages of litera- 
ture, are a little behind the language of their own period, 
because, among other reasons, before their works can have 
acquired such a diffusion and such an established popularity 
as to have entitled them to a permanently conspicuous place 
in the literature of a nation, a sufficient time usually elapses 
to produce some changes in the spoken tongue. Poetry 
makes a deeper impression than prose. Its forms address 
themselves more powerfully to the faculty of memory, and 
for this reason, as well as for its sententiousness, and its 
greater condensation and pungency of expression, it is more 
frequently quoted. Hence, a poem becomes le?*s soon obso- 
lete than a prose work of equal merit and even popularity 
and of course it has a greater influence in keeping alive the 
dialect in which it is expressed. Poetry, considered as an 
art, is more essentially imitative than any branch of prose 
writing. Its means are much more restricted, its rules more 
arbitrary, its models more authoritative. In studying the 
art, therefore, the poet takes form and material together, and 
he who has imbibed the spirit of a Spenser or a Milton, can 
hardly fail unconsciously to adopt a Spenserian or a Miltonic 
diction. 

But our present business is rather with the inflectional 
forms, than with the vocabulary or the grammatical structure 
of the language. Inflected forms, being more or less alike in 
each class of w^ords, have a tendency to produce similarity of 



INFLUENCE OF POETRY 373 

termination and, of course, rhyme. If, /herefore, a word is 
so formed that by dropping an inflected syllable a convenient 
rhyme is lost, the inflection will be retained in poetry after it 
has begun to be obsolete in prose. So, if there are two forms 
of a given word, while, in the conversational and prose dia- 
lect, there is always a tendency to discard one of them, the 
poet will find in the necessities of rhyme, in the convenience 
of making a word at pleasure monosyllabic or polysyllabic, 
a half-foot, an iambus, or a daetyle, and in the advantage of 
repetition without monotony, reasons for retaining both, and 
thus poetry is constantly checking the progress of the lan- 
guage towards a rigid simplification. 

For instance, the present tendency of English is to reject 
the adjectival form in n, as woodm, leathern, and the like, 
and to employ a noun in place of an adjective to express the 
material of which any thing is made ; but the multitude of 
verses in which the true adjective is employed, powerfully 
tends to prevent this ending from becoming altogether obso- 
lete. "Woodworth's fine song, i The Old Oaken Bucket,' 
which has embalmed in undying verse so many of the most 
touching recollections of rural childhood, will preserve the 
more poetic form oaken, together with the memory of the 
almost obsolete implement it celebrates, through all dialectic 
changes, as long as English shall be a spoken tongue. 

The influence of inflections upon the accentuation, and 
consequently the whole articulation of language, is a curious, 
and so far as I am aware, nearly a new subject of inquiry. 
I shall have occasion to consider it more fully hereafter, but 
there are certain general principles which may be appropri- 
ately stated here. In languages varied by weak or augmen- 
tative inflections, the ending, which determines the gram- 
matical relations of a word, must be distinctly articulated, 



374- INFLECTIONS AND ACCENT. 

in order that the category of the word may be known 
To accomplish this, the principal accent mnst be carried for- 
ward towards the end of the word, so as to emphasize one of 
the variable syllables, or there must be a secondary accent 
upon the final syllable, unless this is prosodically long, and 
of course dwelt upon sufficiently to make it distinctly audi 
ble. Now, in languages with uninflected or little varied end- 
ings, the relations of the words being indicated by particles, 
auxiliaries and position, the only syllable which requires to 
be made prominent by accent is the radical one, which gen- 
erally lies near the beginning of the word, and the following 
syllables may be slurred over, with little danger of ambigu- 
ity. The grammatical determinatives, being independent 
words, and usually monosyllabic, are necessarily pronounced 
with some distinctness, and accordingly, if the radical sylla- 
bles be made audible, the speaker is pretty certain to be un- 
derstood. And this is more especially true where, as in the 
German and the English for instance, there is a strong ten- 
dency to inflection by the letter-change. In almost all cases 
where this change takes place, it occurs in a syllable which 
is radical and therefore accented. Its distinct articulation 
makes the whole word intelligible, and we incline to sup- 
press, or at least slight, all other grammatical characteristics, 
while, in languages inflected by augmentation, both the rad- 
ical and all the variable syllables that follow it must be 
enunciated with a clearness that requires a certain effort. 
Other things being equal then, that is, the proportion of vo- 
cal elements being similar, and these of such character as to 
admit of equal facility of utterance, the language with strong 
inflections will be most easily pronounced by the speaker 
and at the same time most readily understood by the hearer 
It is, however, true, on the other hand, that by a natural 



AKTICULATIOX. 375 

adaptation or compensation, the vocal elements seldom or 
never are equally proportioned in inflected and uninflected 
languages, the clear vowel predominating in the former, and 
the obscure consonant in the latter, and, therefore, with a 
full, and musically speaking, staccato enunciation, such as 
is usually possessed by the natives of Southern Europe, the 
inflected language will be most intelligible to the listener. 
But the pronunciation of vowels requires a much greater ex- 
penditure of breath than that of consonants, and the moment 
the articulation becomes artificial, as in reading or speaking 
with an unnatural tone, the demands upon the respiration, 
and the necessity of distinctly pronouncing the unaccented 
terminal syllables, conspire to make it more fatiguing to the 
reader or speaker. I am aware that Humboldt remarks, that 
after having been long accustomed to use Spanish, he found 
the return to German fatiguing to the organs of speech. I 
think this, however, was from the necessity of employing in 
pronunciation muscles long disused, and that the sense of 
weariness was confined to those muscles. But let any one 
equally familiar with two foreign languages, one inflected 
and one invariable, or one with strong and one with weak in- 
flections, try the experiment of reading aloud an hour in 
each, and he will find, as a general rule, that the more nu- 
merous the weak inflections, the more fatiguing the reading. 
German and Italian may serve to illustrate the difference, the 
latter exhausting the voice of the reader much the soonest. 
It is true that the comparison if these two languages is not 
in all respects a perfectly farr test of the soundness of the 
principles I have laid down. The German has terminal in- 
flections to as great an extent as the Italian, but it must be 
remembered that, in conjunction with these, it very often em- 
ploys the letter-change in the accented syllable, and this ren- 



376 ITALIAN ARTICULATION. 

ders it unnecessary to bring the final vowel fully out. The 
plural of die Hand is dieHande, but the vowel-change 
in the radical syllable indicates the number with so much 
certainty, that the e final may be dropped or half-suppressed, 
without creating any ambiguity. In Italian, the inflected 
syllable or syllables always terminate the word, and them- 
selves end with a vowel. In the singular number of the 
verbs, the person, and in nouns and adjectives, both number 
and gender, are usually determined by the final vowel alone, 
so that in most cases the grammatical category of the word, 
and of course its relations to the period, depend upon a sin- 
gle vowel, which of course must be very clearly articulated. 
Again, the final vowel in German inflected words is very 
commonly the obscure e, while in Italian words it is the open 
vowel a, or long o and % the feminine e being of less frequent 
occurrence. All these Italian endings make larger demands 
on the organs of speech than the German terminations. 
Further, the constant use of the nominative personal pronoun 
in German allows a less emphatic utterance of the signs of 
person in the verb, its frequent omission in Italian requires 
these signs to be made conspicuous. The general result of 
all these circumstances is that in German, in most cases, the 
only syllable which requires a very distinct pronunciation is 
the radical ; in Italian, there is another syllable, and that a 
final vowel, which demands an equally full and precise de- 
livery. Of course, in Italian, both causes of exhaustion, the 
predominance of open vowels, and the necessity of accentu- 
ating and distinctly articulating a greater number of sylla- 
bles, co-exist, and allowance must be made accordingly in 
treating the German as a representative of uninflected, the 
Italian of inflected languages, with reference to facility of 



ITALIAN ARTICULATION. 377 

utterance. A: :he same time, I think similar general con- 
clusions will be arrived at, by comparing any two speeches^ 
the one inflected, the other nninflected, or marked, the one 
by weak, the other by strong, inflections. 



LECTURE XVIII. 

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS. 

IV. 

In order to comprehend and appreciate the nature and 
extent of the change which English has undergone in the 
transformation from an inflected to a comparatively unin- 
fected structure, we must cast a glance at the. grammatical 
system of the Anglo-Saxon, from which modern English is 
chiefly derived. The border-land of the Scandinavian and 
Teutonic races, whence the Anglo-Saxon invaders of England 
appear to have emigrated, has always been remarkable for 
the number of its local dialects, and it is very doubtful 
whether there is anywhere to be found a district of so nar- 
row extent with so great a multitude of tongues, or rather 
jargons. The Frisic, which may be said, as a whole, to bear 
a closer resemblance than any other linguistic group to the 
English, differs so much in different localities, that the dia- 
lects of Frisian parishes, separated only by a narrow arm of 
the sea, are often quite unintelligible to the inhabitants of 
each other.* The general ultimate tendency of this confusion 

* It is not always safe to rely on the vocabularies of philologists who collect 
Words to sustain theories, and therefore we may doubt the accuracy of the gener 



ANGLO-SAXON GRAMMAR. 379 

of tongues is undoubtedly towards uniformity, jut uniform- 
ity must be attained by mutual concessions. Each dialect 
must sacrifice most of its individual peculiarities before a 
common speech can be framed out of the whole of them. 
These peculiarities lie much in inflection. The dialects, it 
may be predicted, will be harmonized by dropping discord- 
ant endings ; and if the Frisic shall survive long enough to 
acquire a character of unity, it will be very nearly what the 

alizations of most inquirers into the Frisic patois. If we can depend on the 
testimony of unprejudiced observers, or of the people themselves, there is no 
Buch unity of speech among those who employ what, for want of a better term, 
or to support particular ethnological views, are collectively called the Frisian 
dialects, as to entitle them to a unity of designation. According to Kohl, the 
most acute and observant of travellers in Europe, "The commonest things, 
which are named almost alike all over Europe, receive quite different names in 
the different Frisic islands. Thus, in Am rum, father is called Aatj; on the 
Halligs, Bab a or Babe; in Sylt, FoderorVaar; in many districts on the 
main land Tate; in the eastern part of Fohr, Oti or Ahitj. Although 
these people live within a couple of [German] miles from each other, these 
words differ more than p&re, pater, padre, Vater, and father used for 
the same purpose by the French, Latins, Italians, Germans, and English, who 
are separated by hundreds of leagues. We find among the Frisians not only 
primitive Germanic words, but what may be called common European radicals, 
which different localities seem to have distributed among them." 

" Even the names of their districts and islands are totally different in differ- 
ent dialects. For instance, the island called by the Frisians who speak High- 
German, Sylt, is called by the inhabitants Sol, in Fohr Sol, and in Amrum 
Sal." 

"The people of Amrum call the Frisians Frask, with the vowel short; in 
the southern districts, the word is Frees ke, with a long vowel; elsewhere it 
is pronounced Fraasche." Kohl. II., Chap. XX. 

It appears further, from the same excellent writer, that these numerous dia- 
lects are intelligible only to the inhabitants of the narrow localities where they 
are indigenous, and that their variations are too great to permit the grammars 
and glossaries which have yet appeared to be regarded as any thing more than 
expositions of the peculiarities of individual patois, and by no means as au- 
thorities for the existence of any such general speech as the imaginary Frisic of 
linguistic theories. The argument for the oneness of these dialects rests chiefly 
on negatives. It may be said of each of them : it is not Danish nor Dutch, nor 
Low-German nor High-German, but, at the same time, they all resemble any one 
of these languages very nearly as much as they do each other. See Lecture II 



380 ANGLO-SAXON GRAMMAR. 

English would have been without the il production of eo 
many words of Komance origin. 

Such a process as this the Anglo-Saxon actually under- 
went in England, and accordingly its flectional system, in the 
earliest examples which have come clown to us, is less com 
plete than in either of the Gothic tongues that contributed 
to its formation. In fact, the different Angle and Saxon dia- 
lects employed in England never thoroughly amalgamated, 
and there was always much irregularity and confusion in 
orthography and the use of inflections, so that the accidence 
of the language, in no stage of it, exhibits the precision and 
uniformity of that of the Icelandic or the Mceso-Gothic. 

In giving a general sketch of the grammar of our ancient 
Anglican speech, I shall not notice local or archaic peculiar- 
ities of form, and the statements I make may be considered 
as applicable to the Anglo-Saxon in the best period of its lit- 
erature, and, with unimportant exceptions, true of all its 
distinguishable dialects. 

In general, then, we may say that the article, noun, ad- 
jective and pronoun were declinable, having different forms 
for the three genders, for four cases, and for the singular and 
plural numbers ; besides which, the personal pronoun of the 
first and second persons had a dual, or form exclusively ap- 
propriated to the number two. This, in the first person, was 
wit, we two ; in the second, git, you two. The possessive 
had also a dual. The adjective, as in the other Gothic lan- 
guages, had two forms of inflection, the one employed when 
the adjective was used without a determinative, the other 
when it was preceded by an article or a pronoun agreeing 
also with the noun. These forms are called, respectively, the 
indefinite and the definite. Tims, the adjective correspond- 
ing to good, used in the definite form singular, or with a 



ANGLO-SAXON GRAMHAK. 381 

determinative, makes the nominative masculine god a, fem- 
inine gode, neuter, gode; the genitive or possessive, go- 
dan, for all the genders. When used without a determina- 
tive, the nominative is god, for the three genders ; the 
genitive or possessive, godes, for the masculine and neuter 
and godre for the feminine. The adjective was also regu- 
larly compared much as in the modern English augmentative 
form, but not by more and most 

The verbs had four moods : the indicative, subjunctive, in, 
perative and infinitive, and but two tenses, the present or ir. 
definite, used also as a future, and the past. There were, how 
ever, compound tenses in the active voice, and a passive voice 
formed as in modern English by the aid of other verbs. In 
English the auxiliaries are generally used simply as indica- 
tions of time, as, he will sing, which is merely a future of the 
verb to sing, like the Latin cantabit; he had sung, the 
Latin cantaverat. In Saxon, on the other hand, the aux- 
iliary usually retained its independent meaning, and was 
more rarely employed as a mere determinative. Thus w i 1 - 
Ian, corresponding to our will, when used wnth an infinitive, 
did not form a future, but always expressed a purpose, as in- 
deed it still often does, and with the remarkable exception of 
the verb b e o n , to be, which is generally future, the Saxon 
had absolutely no method of expressing the future by any 
form or combination of verbs, so that the context alone de- 
termines the time. 

While, then, the English article has but one form for all 
cases, genders and numbers, the Saxon had ten. Our noun 
has two forms, one for the nominative and objective, one for 
the possessive and plural ; or, in the few nouns with the 
strong plural inflection, four, as man, man's, men, men's ; 
generally the Saxon had five or six. The modern adjective 



CHANGES IN ENGLISH GRAMMAR. 

has one termination in the positive degree, the Saxon ten. 
The English regular or weak verb, as to love, seven endings ; 
the corresponding Saxon, thirteen, even without counting the 
inflected cases of the participles. From all this, it will be 
obvious that the Anglo-Saxon could indicate by inflections 
many relations and conditions of words which we can express 
only by particles ; and that consequently it was more inde- 
pendent of fixed laws of position, and less encumbered by 
determinatives, than modern English. By way of illustration 
of the force and beauty which the Anglo-Saxon element con- 
fers upon English, I compared the conclusion of the parable 
of the men who built their houses respectively upon sand 
and upon rock, in the versions of St. Matthew and St. Luke, 
as rendered by the authorized English translation. It will 
be interesting to analyze St. Matthew's account of the same 
catastrophe in the Anglo-Saxon, in Wy cliff e's translation of 
about 1380, in Tyndale's, of 1526, and King James's, of 
1611.* The Anglo-Saxon, translated word for word into our 
present English, would read thus : Then rained it, and there 
came flood, and blew winds, and rushed on that house, and 
the [or that] house fell, and its fall was great. 

Here it will be observed that the verbs rained, came and 
blew all precede their nominatives, and it may be added that 
blew and rushed both have a distinct plural form, hi eow on 
and ahrurcw. 

In Wycliffe's time, although the plural form of the verb 
was still retained, yet the general loss of the inflections of 
the noun had compelled the introduction of a positional syn- 
tax, and he writes, in the modern order of arrangement : 

* The texts of the Greek, Moeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon and modern English 
rersions of the passage under consideration, will be found in a note to Lecture 
VII., pages 165, 166. 



CHANGES IN ENGLISH GRAMMAR. 383 



en. 



" and rayn came doun, and floodis cam^, and wyndis blew 
and thei hurlid<m in to that house ; and it felle doun, and the 
fallyng donn therof was grete." 

Before Tyndale, 1526, the plnral form of the verb in n % 
had become obsolete. We read, accordingly, in his version 
" And abundannce of rayne descended, and the fhiddes came, 
and the wyndes blewe, and beet upon that housse, and it fell, 
and great was the fall of it." 

Between the Anglo-Saxon and the English of Wycliffe, 
the most important grammatical difference is the greater 
freedom of arrangement in the Anglo-Saxon verbs, which in 
this passage, in three instances, precede the nominative ; 
whereas in Wycliffe the verb uniformly follows its subject, 
as in the modern dialect. In the century and a half which 
intervened between Wycliffe and Tyndale, not only had the 
verbs dropped the plural ending, but the definite article had 
become common. In Saxon, we cannot deny that the defi- 
nite article existed, but it always partook very strongly of its 
original character of a demonstrative pronoun, and perhaps 
it should be rather regarded as such in the one instance where 
I have represented it by the, " and the house fell." In Wyc- 
liffe, rayn* floodis and wyndis are all without the article, 
" rayn came doun, and fiuddes camen, and wyndis blewen ," 
and it is employed only before fallyng, " and the fallyng 
doun therof;" but in Tyndale's time the noun had ceased 
to be used thus indefinitely, &ndfluddes, wyndes and fall are 
all preceded by the article the. The translators of 1611, with 
excellent judgment, adopted Tyndale's version word for word, 
with no change except to say simply " the raine," for " abun- 
daunce of rayne," which Tyndale had used. And here 1 
cannot but pause to notice a remarkable felicity of expression 



384: NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 

in this translation, in the employment of an inversion of tho 
regular order of words in the last clause of the verse. The 
fact of the fall of the house had been already announced, and 
made additionally striking by an enumeration of the circum- 
stances which had preceded and caused it — the pouring of the 
rain, the rushing of the flood, the blast of the tempest. The im- 
mediate introduction of the noun fall would have added noth- 
ing to the effect of what had gone before. To heighten and in- 
tensify the impression, therefore, the translator skilfully inverts 
the phrase, begins the concluding clause with the adjective — ■ 
" and it fell, and great was the fall of it," — and thus produces 
a climax superior in force even to the original Greek text. 

"When, as a natural result of Latin and Norman influence, 
the operation of such causes as I described in the last lecture 
had stripped the Anglo-Saxon of most of its inflections, and 
introduced a large number of Romance words and grammati- 
cal forms, the first effort of the newly-framed speech was to 
develop a new set of inflections, and if English had existed 
as an unwritten tongue for a sufficient time after the coa- 
lescence of the two elements into one language, it is probable 
that it would have acquired as complete a system of declen- 
sion and conjugation, and consequently a syntax as free from 
restraints of position as either of its constituent tongues. 
The Saxon nouns had several modes of forming the plural, 
according to gender and declension. One of these declen- 
sions only made the nominative plural in s. This agreed 
Adth the ISTorman grammar, which, like the modern French, 
used s or 2, (and in a few cases x,) as the sign of the plural, 
and it was natural that this coincidence should have been 
seized upon and adopted as a general rule for the construc- 
tion of all plurals. True, some plurals formed by letter 



NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 385 

cnange or in n remained, but most Saxon nonns dropped the 
regular inflection, and from the very commencement of the 
English language took a plural in s. This is abundantly 
shown by Layamon and the Ormulum, the former using this 
plural (especially in the later text) very frequently, the latter 
employing it almost exclusively. 

The Saxon nouns had three genders, and the masculine 
and feminine were very often applied to objects incapable of 
sex. The Norman had but two genders, the neuter not being 
recognized in its grammar. When the two languages coa 
lesced, a compromise was effected by employing the mascu- 
line and feminine as indications, not of grammatical gender, 
or termination, but of sex, and confining the neuter to ob- 
jects without sex. This, of course, led to the rejection of 
those Anglo-Saxon endings of the article, the noun and the 
adjective, which had indicated grammatical gender; and as 
the Saxon inflections for case depended more or less upon the 
gender, they naturally were dropped also when grammatical 
gender was discarded. Nothing then was left for distinction 
but the numbers, singular and plural. Although one declen- 
sion of the Saxon nouns made the plural in s, and thereby 
the general adoption of s as a sign for the plural of nouns was 
facilitated, yet no plural form of the Saxon adjective em- 
ployed that sign. The termination in e was the general nom- 
inative plural ending of all adjectives in the indefinite form, 
and this continued to be used in English to designate that 
number for some centuries, though not with strict uniformity. 
Indeed, when the adjective was employed as a noun, it some- 
times made the plural in e, even down to the erd of the six- 
teenth century.* The e, as a sign of nimiber, was finally 

* See Lecture XIV. 
25 



386 NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS 

dropped soon after that period, and adjectives have since 
been indeclinable. 

The verb, which, to the distinctions of number and per- 
son, in most languages adds those of time and other condi- 
tions, is always subject to a greater number of inflectional 
changes than any other part of speech. The conjugations 
of the Saxon and the Norman verb had scarcely any point of 
resemblance except the employment of compound tenses, and 
the consequence naturally was, that the characteristic endings 
of both were principally rejected, and the radical of the verb 
left almost uninflected, and dependent on auxiliaries for the 
expression of the various modifications of its radical mean- 
ing. In its selection of auxiliaries, it conformed partly to 
Romance, partly to Gothic models ; and it must be admitted 
that with respect to the future tense, the English syntax is an 
improvement upon the Saxon. Shall and will, it is true, 
existed in that language, but not as true auxiliaries, and the 
use of them as signs of the future, if not directly borrowed 
from the Old-Northern, at least belongs to the Scandinavian, 
not the Teutonic side of Anglo-Saxon. 

One of the most curious facts in the history of the Eng- 
lish verb is the tendency which existed in the thirteenth and 
fourteenth centuries to the formation of new regular inflec- 
tions, by the coalescence or agglutination of verbs and pro- 
nouns. This was indeed, perhaps, in some sort, a dialectic 
peculiarity, but cases occur in too wide a range of writers 
to allow us to consider it as by any means altogether local in 
its character. It seems to have begun with the interrogative, 
where the pronoun, following the verb, would most easily 
unite with it ; but the agglutinate form is often used in 
affirmative periods. The coalescence of the pronoun of the 



NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 387 

second person and the verb is most frequent, but examples 
of a like process in the other persons are not wanting. Thus 
in the fable of Dame Siriz in "Wright's Analecta Literaria, 
there are several instances of the use of willi and woldi, for 
I will and I would ; in the ancient Interlocutory Poem in 
the first volume of the Keliquiss Antiquae, we find kepi, hawy, 
cani, for I keep, I have, I can ; in the Thrush and the Night- 
ingale, in the same volume, ne rechi, for I do not reck or 
care ; forbeddi, for I forbid. The coalescence of the second 
person with the verb is extremely common, and there are few 
English writers of the fourteenth century who do not furnish 
exemplifications of it. Robert of Gloucester has penJcestow, 
misdostow, for thinkest thou, misdoest thou. Dame Siriz, 
troustu, for trowest thou ; the Seven Sages, woltu, for thou 
wilt ; the ancient Interlocutory Poem above referred to a 
like form, with the pronoun, thu canstu j and Piers Plough- 
man, among numerous other cases, the negative infiection, 
why nadistou, why hadst-thou-not.* 

In the carelessness of pronunciation, which usually marks 
hasty and familiar speaking, the auxiliary have is indistinctly 
articidated. " I should have gone," is pronounced almost, 



* Similar combinations are found in German, even as late as the time of 
Luther. Thus, in Warnunge D. M. Luther an seine lieben Deudsehen, Witten- 
berg, 1531, wiltu occurs at F. III. and mustu at F. b. In the much older 
Orendel und Bride, Zurich, 1858, we find instances of the coalescence of all the 
three persons with the verb : woldi jh, p. 17 ; mahtu, 6; vasthi, woldhi, 
1 ; kondhi, 9. 

In the famous abrenuntio Diaboli, of the eighth century, Wright 
(Biog. Britan. Lit. I., 310,) prints forsachistu, gelobistu, but other critics 
separate the pronoun from the verb. There are many instances of like combi- 
nations in old Icelandic, and among others may be mentioned the construction 
of a negative form of the verb by affixing the particle, a, a t, a p , or a 5 ; also 
of negative forms of the noun, adjective, pronoun, and adverb, by affixing the 
syllables gi or ki. 



388 NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 

" I should a gone," and by persons ignorant of reading and 
writing, altogether so. In old English books, many instances 
occur where the compound tense is thus printed, as, for ex- 
ample, in Lord Berners' Froissart, vol. I., chap. 225, " a man 
coude not cast an appell among the, but it shuld a fallen on 
a bassenet or a helme ; " in Wycliffe's Apology for the Lol- 
lards, page 1, " I knowlech to a felid and seid fms." In 
the Paston Letters, I. 22, " brybe's that wold a robbed a ship ; " 
Paston Letters, I. 6, "a gret nowmbre come to Ar fleet for to 
arescuyd it," in which last example the coalescence is com- 
plete. 

A like tendency is discoverable in other classes of words, 
such as the formation of an objective of the definite article 
the by a coalescence with the prepositions in, on and at / ythe, 
ith being often written for in the, oth for on the, atte for at 
the. There are also traces of a new form in the nouns. In 
Icelandic, Swedish and Danish, the nouns have a definite 
declension formed by affixing the termination of the definite 
article according to case and gender. Thus, in Swedish, 
konung means king, konungen, the king, konungens, 
#A# king's ; hus means house, huset, Chouse.* A some- 
what similar contraction existed in early English, in the case 
of nouns beginning with a vowel. The empress was written 



* The definite article is den for the masculine and feminine, det for the 
tteuter. In the process of coalescence, the initial consonant d is dropped, and 
konung den becomes konungen, hus det, huset. This, at least, is the 
present grammatical resolution of the compound. Historically, however, kon- 
ungen is the Icelandic konungrinn, a definite formed by the coalescence of 
the noun kondngr, and the definite pronominal article hinn, (for which latter 
word the modern Swedish substitutes den,) and so of other nouns which have 
been traditionally lumded down from the Old-Northern period. In the definite 
form of new words, the analogy of the primitive language has been folio w^d, 
and the article retains the d only when it stands alone. 



NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 38$ 

and spoken as one word, thempress / the evangel or gospel, 
thevangel / the apostle, thapostle / the ancre (anchor) thancre. 
There are even faint and doubtful indications of a like incli- 
nation with regard to the article an, and the creation of an in- 
definite form of the noun by employing this article as a prefix : 
tlin s we find a nedgetoole for an edge-tool, a nounpire* for an 
umpire, but these seem to be rather cases of orthographical 
confusion than really new combinations. 

The effect of reducing a language to writing is to put a 
stop to the formation of inflections. Inflections doubtless 
often grow out of a hurried and indistinct pronunciation of 
familiar and frequently recurring combinations ; but, when the 
words are written, the mind is constantly brought back to 
the radical forms, and the tendency to coalescence thus ar- 
rested ; and indeed the effect of writing does not stop here, 
but it leads to the resolution of compounds not much altered 
in form, into their primitive elements. 

In listening to the conversation of uneducated persons, 
and even to the familiar colloquial speech of the better in- 
structed, we observe a strong inclination to the coalescence 
of words. Let a foreigner, who should be wholly ignorant 
of the grammatical structure of the European languages, but 
able to write down articulations, record the words of our or- 
dinary conversation as he would hear them spoken. The 
result would be an approximation to an inflected language. 
He would agglutinate in writing the words which we agglu- 
tinate in speaking, and thus, in many cases, form a regular 
conjugation. Take for example the interrogative use of the 



* The n in nounpirc may be radical, for it has been ingeniously suggested, 
that this obscure word is perhaps non pair, odd one, a third person called in 
«0 turn the scale between two disagreeing arbitrators. 



390 NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 

verb to have; have I? have you? has he? The stranger 
would not suspect that each of these phrases was composed 
of two words, but would treat them as the first, second and 
third persons of an interrogative form of the verb to have. 
His spelling would conform to the pronunciation, and he 
would write havvi, havye, hazzy. Now those who first re- 
duce a language to writing are much in the condition I have 
just supposed. They record what they hear, and had Eng- 
lish long remained unwritten, the coalescences would have 
become established, and conjugations and declensions formed 
accordingly. The interrogative would have had its regular 
verbal inflection, and a past infinitive, agone. afallen, would 
have grown out of the combination of the participle with 
the auxiliary, the latter becoming a syllabic augment.* 

This is precisely analogous to what actually did take place 
in most of the Romance dialects, because they were used 
colloquially for centuries before they were written, the Latin 
being the language of the government, of law, of literature, 
and of religion. 

The two great elements of which English is composed 
had each its written dialect, and it would therefore have been 
quite natural that the new language should very early have 
become a written speech, if there had been an actual histor- 
ical hiatus between Anglo-Saxon and Norman-English. B; t 
the change from the one to the other was so gradual, that the 
spoken dialect always existed in a written form, orthographi- 
cal mutations following closely upon orthoepical revolutions. 

* In French, it was only the early reduction of the spoken tongue to writ- 
ing, which prevented the development of* a regular negative verb, and definite 
noun. N' a voir would have become permanently n avoir, and l'homme, 
lorn me, in writing as well as in speech, had French remained merely an oral 
dialect a few centuries longer. 



NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 391 

Between Latin and the modern Eomance tongnes, on the othe* 
band, there was an interval, and consequently these latter, as 
literary dialects, had a definite commencement, while Eng- 
lish had none. Hence, English made little progress in new 
grammatical formations, and the predominance of Norman 
influence led to the rejection not only of Saxon endings, bu 
of many other facilities of expression, the loss of which is a 
very serious evil to the English tongue. For instance, the 
Saxon had a negative form for all verbs beginning with a 
vowel, the aspirate h, or the semi-vowel w. This consisted 
in using the consonant n, the initial of the Saxon negative 
particle n e , as a prefix. The convenience of this form was 
strongly felt, and it was not abandoned in poetry for some 
centuries after English became a distinct language. Chaucer 
constantly says I nam, for I am not, I nas, for I was not, he 
nould, for he would not, he nad, for he had not, I nill, for I 
will not. The Wycliffite versions often use the negative verb 
in the imperative, as in Judges xviii. 9 : " JVyle ye be 
negligent, nil ye ceese." Sylvester at the end of the six- 
teenth century, occasionally employs this form, as, for exam- 
ple, in this verse of his twenty-sixth sonnet : 

Who nill be subjects, shall be slaves, in fine. 

We still retain the negative nill in the phrase, will he, nill 
he, whether he will or not, where will and nill are not aux- 
iliaries, but independent verbs. Wesley attempted to revive 
nill, and wrote : " Man wills something, because it is pleasing 
to nature, and he mils something, because it is painful to na- 
ture." The linguistic sense of the English people was at a 
low ebb in Wesley's time, and his use of nill found few if any 
imitators, but the fact that we still employ similar compounds 



392 NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 

in none, neither, never, which are simply one, either, ever y 
with the negative prefix n, shows that this form is not radi- 
cally repugnant to the present genius of the language, and I 
see nothing very improbable in the recovery of the negative 
verb. 

The Norman, though it had its coalescences, like the 
other Romance dialects, as for instance in the case of the fu- 
ture, was nevertheless averse to compounds ; and as it became 
more and more an influential element in the organization of 
English, it not only checked further coalescence, but led to 
the resolution of some compounds which had become estab- 
lished, and hence the new inflections were soon abandoned.* 

The only deliberate, organized experiment for the restora- 
tion of an obsolete English form, is that of the Society of 
Friends, who have long striven to reintroduce what they call 
the plain language, or the employment of the singular thou, 
and the corresponding verbal inflection, in place of the plural 
you, in addressing a single person. It is not strange that a 
phraseology, which was adopted as the badge of a sect, 
should have failed to secure general acceptance, but the en- 
tire want of success in the attempt to establish it even among 
the Friends themselves, is a strong evidence of the rooted 

* Our English verb to hunt appears to be allied to a Moeso-Gothic word of 
nearly similar form, which has been conjectured to be cognate with hand, so 
that the primary signification of hunt would be, to take with the hand, or catch. 
Some etymologists derive hound from hunt, but it is quite as probable that hunt 
is derived from hound, which in Saxon was spelt not with ou, but simply u. In 
that case, to hunt would be to chase with hounds, or dogs, or, as we sometimes 
now say, to hound or to dog. At the period when there was a tendency to 
resolve compounds, this very obvious, and as I much incline to believe true ety- 
mology, struck the rude philologists of the time, and, accordingly, we find hunts- 
man written in early English houndsman, sometimes as one word, but not un- 
frequently as two, hounds man. See the History of Helyas, Thorn's Early Prose 
Romances, III., 55, 65. 



NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 393 

aversion of the Anglican people and speech to much variety 
of inflection. In the first fervor of religious party zeal, 
doubtless, educated Friends spoke more grammatically, but 
the second person of the verb does not appear ever to have 
been generally employed by their followers ; and even the 
nominative of the pronoun of the second person was soon 
discarded, so that will thee, has thee, does thee, were substi- 
tuted for wilt thou, hast thou, dost thou. 

That we shall recover many lost Saxon words there can 
be no doubt, and poetry will yet reanimate obsolete forms 
specially adapted to metrical convenience. E"ew regular in- 
flections, however, are not to be expected, perhaps not even 
desired ; and some grammarians even consider it probable 
that formal distinctions of case, number and person will be 
rejected altogether, and all grammatical relations determined 
by auxiliaries, prepositions or other particles. That such 
has been the general tendency of English since the birth of 
its literature is quite certain, and the fact is too familiar to 
need to be established by proof, but one or two examples 
may be worth citing. The use of the possessive pronouns, 
and of the inflected possessive case of nouns and pronouns, 
was, until a comparatively recent period, very much more 
extensive than at present, and they were employed in many 
cases where the preposition with the objective now takes their 
place. In modern English, the inflected possessive of nouns 
expresses almost exclusively the notion of property or appur- 
tenance. Hence, we say a man's hat, or a man's hand, but 
the description of a man, not a man's description. And, of 
course, we generally limit the application of this form to 
words which indicate objects capable of possessing or enjoying 
the right of property, in a word, to persons, or at least ani- 



394 ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. 

mated and conscious creatures, and we accordingly speak of a 
woman's bonnet, but not of a house's roof. In short, we now 
distinguish, between the possessive and the genitive. This we 
must allow is a well-founded distinction, but it is of recent in- 
troduction ; and indeed some modern writers are inclined tc 
discard it, but thus far with few imitators. Clifford, who had 
been a follower of Wycliffe, and recanted, expresses his repent- 
ance in his will before referred to, by styling himself "unwor- 
thie and Goddis tray tor" So in the Paston Letters, written 
in the fifteenth century, we find u the King's rebels, the 
King's traitors" for rebels against the king, traitors to the 
king, and in Froissart, " his rebels." These expressions strike 
us oddly, but in reality they are not a whit more incongruous 
than the phrases, the hinges enemies, our enemies, which have, 
singularly enough, remained current in English, and indeed 
in most European languages, but which will perhaps become 
as obsolete as the hinges traitors. We may consistently say 
the king 1 's friends, because we feel that men have certain 
rights, or at least interests, in their friends and in the senti- 
ments which constitute friendship, but the Icing's enemies is no 
way grammatically distinguishable from the king's rebels. 
Few instances now remain of this repugnant use of the pos- 
sessive, but its limitation to persons did not originate till long 
after the date of the authorities I have cited. Lodge, who 
translated the works of L. Annseus Seneca, near the beginning 
of the seventeenth century, says, in the preface to the second 
edition of that work : " Reader, I here once more present thee 
Senecaes translation." In this case Seneca is to be considered 
the name, not of a person, but of his works collectively. This 
construction is frequent in Shakespeare, and Fuller in the In- 
fant's Advocate printed in 1653, has this passage : " If we can- 



ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. 395 

not perceive the manner of sins poison, no wonder if we can- 
not conceive the method of graces antidote, in Infants souls." 
Similar examples might be multiplied ad infinitum* 

In like manner, what is now a possessive pronoun was 
anciently but improperly used also as a genitive of the per- 
sonal pronoun. In the "Wycliffite version of Genesis ix. 2, 
we read : " And youre feer and youre tremblyng be upon alle 
the beestis of erthe," where the modern version rightly has, 
" and the fear of you and the dread of youP The posses- 
si ves of the third person his and their were employed in this 
way much later than those of the first and second person, 
and even in recent times many instances can be found where 
these pronouns take a relative after them, as " their life who 
violate the principles of morality," for " the life of those 
who."t 

* Notwithstanding this free use of the inflected possessive by old writers, 
we sometimes meet in them a long succession of the prepositional construction, 
as in this passage from the life of Beza in Abel Redivivus, p. 471 : " for he not 
onely entred into a consideration of the truth of the doctrines of the Church of 
Rome, &c." 

f In Anglo-Saxon, the possessive pronoun singular of the first person waa 
min, of the second pin. The genitive plural of the personal pronoun was 
u r e in the first person, eower in the second, h i r a, h i o r a , or h e o r a , in 
the third. The possessive pronouns pkiral of the first and second persons were 
formed by treating the genitive plural of the personal pronouns, as a nominative, 
and declining it like an adjective pronoun. For the third person, there was no 
possessive pronoun in either the singular or plural, but the genitives, his in the 
masculine and neuter singular, hire in the feminine singular, and hira, 
h i o r a or h e o r a for all genders in the plural, were used instead of possessive 
pronouns. The similarity of form between the genitive plural of the first and 
second persons and the plural possessive pronoun for those persons, naturally 
led to grammatical and logical confusion in the use of both, and the expressions 
I have quoted from the VVycliffite versions, " your fear," &c, were as improper 
at that time, as they would be now, for the logical distinction between the two 
pronominal forms was at no period of the language quite lost sight of, though 
it was not always strictly observed. 

In the transition from Anglo-Saxon to English, the genitive plural of the 
personal pronoun was dropped, and the objective, with a preposition, substituted 



396 ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. 

At present, the us>e of whose, the possessive of who, is 
pretty generally confined to persons, or things personified, 
and we should scruple to say, " I passed a house whose win- 
dows were open." This is a modern, and indeed by no means 
yet fully established, distinction. In Anglo-Saxon, the form 
hwses, whence our whose, was the genitive of all the gen- 
ders of the pronoun h w a , and whose was universally em- 
ployed as a neuter by the best English writers until a recent 
period, as, in certain combinations, it still is by very good 
authorities. The origin of this distinction is to be found in 
a fact to which I have before alluded, namely, the change in 
the office of genders in grammar. In Anglo-Saxon, gram- 

for it. This change was made before the time of Wycliffe, and the use of the 
possessive pronoun, instead of the genitive of the personal pronoun, was a vio- 
lation of the idiom of the language. This is shown abundantly by the authority 
of the Wycliffite translators themselves, for they very generally make the dis- 
tinction, as, for example, in Joshua vii. 13, where we read " cursyinge is in the 
midel of thee" in the older text, and " in the myddis of thee" in the later, and 
in Ezekiel xxxvi. 23, where one text has "in the myddil of them ," the other "in 
the myddis of them; " and so in many other passages, where these old trans- 
lations agree with the authorized version. The vulgarism u in our midst," "in 
your midst," "in their midst," now unhappily very common, grows out of this 
confusion. The possessive pronoun cannot be properly applied, except as in- 
dicative of possession or appurtenance. The "midst" of a company or com- 
munity of persons is not a thing belonging or appurtenant to the company, or 
to the individuals composing it. It is a mere term of relation, of an adverbial, 
not a substantive, character, and is an intensified form of expression for among. 
The phrase in question, therefore, is a gross solecism, and unsupported by the 
authority of pure idiomatic English writers. Shakespeare, 2 Pt. Henry VI. iv. 
8, has " through the very midst of you ; " and this is the constant form in the au- 
thorized translation of the Bible. In Leviticus xxvi. 11, the Anglo-Saxon is to 
middes eowre (eower), to-middes being a preposition governing the 
personal pronoun eowre. The English translations all give "among you." In 
John i. 26, where the Greek text is /j.4(tos 5e v/xwu, the Anglo-Saxon is to- 
middes eow; the later Wycliffite version, "in the myddil of you; " the 
older " the myddil man of you." See, further, Appendix, 54. 

Milton's "my midst of sorrow," Siimson Agonistes, 1339, is a poetical trans* 
position for 'the midst of my sorrow,' and has no bearing on the present 
question. 



ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. 397 

matical gender was independent of sex. So long as the mas- 
culine, feminine and neuter were indiscriminately applied to 
objects incapable of the distinction of sex, there was no very 
strong sense of a want of one possessive form for masculine 
and feminine, or in other words, personal objects, and an- 
other for neuter, or inanimate, impersonal things ; but as this 
distinction became better and better established, and who 
was appropriated to persons, which to things* the use of one 
possessive form for both was more and more felt to be incon- 
sistent, and the employment of the possessive of both nouns 
and pronouns was regulated accordingly. 

The necessity of a double form for the more precise ex- 
pression of ideas which have become distinct, has led to 
the development of one of the few new inflections which 
modern English has evolved. In Anglo-Saxon, the personal 
pronoun represented in English by he, she, it, made the gen- 
itive or possessive his for the masculine and neuter gender, 
her (hire) for the feminine, and so long as grammatical 
gender had not an invariable relation to sex, the employment 
of a common form for the masculine and neuter excited no 
feeling of incongruity. The change in the grammatical sig- 
nificance of gender suggested the same embarrassment with 
relation to the universal application of his as of whose, and 
when this was brought into distinct consciousness, a remedy 
was provided. At first, it was used as a possessive, without 
inflection or a preposition, and several instances of this oc- 
cur in Shakespeare, as also in Leviticus xxv. 5, of the Bi- 



* The Anglo-Saxon relative and interrogative was h w a, masc. and fem., and 
hwfet, neut. It is true, li w a Avas generally employed in reference to per- 
sons, but, at least in interrogations, h w se t was very often used, in the same 
?;ay, as II w tet is bes Mannes Sunu. Who is this Son of Man ? 



898 INTRODUCTION OF ITS. 

ble of 1611 : u That which groweth of it own accord."* Its y 
although to be found in printed books of a somewhat earlier 
date, is not once used in that edition, his being in all cases 
but that just cited employed instead. The precise date and 
occasion of the first introduction of its is not ascertained, but 
it could not have been far from the year 1600. I believe tha 
earliest instances of the use of the neuter possessive yet ob- 
served are in Shakespeare, and other dramatists of that age. 
Most English writers continued for some time longer to em- 
ploy his indiscriminately with reference to male persons or 
creatures, and to inanimate impersonal things. For a con- 
siderable period about the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, there was evidently a sense of incongruity in the appli- 
cation of his to objects incapable of the distinction of sex, 
and at the same time, a reluctance to sanction the introduc- 

* The use of an uninflected form as a possessive, without the preposition of^ 
was by no means confined to the pronoun it. In Robert of Gloucester, 93, we 
have 

Conan be queue cosyn, he clepude out po stille, 

and again 

pe ich be kyng of Breteyne, pat was pin vncle lond. 

The first verse of Robert de Brunne's version of Langtoft runs thus : 
In Saint Bede bokes writen er stories olde ; 
and on page 13 : 

In Charlemagn courte, sire of Saint Dinys. 

In the older Wycliffite version of Genesis xxix. 10, we find: " Whom whanne 
Jacob hadde seen, and wiste hir his unkil dowghter\" and xxx. 36: "and putte 
a space of thre daies weye bitwix hem and his dowghtir husboond." These latter 
cases might, it is true, be considered compounds, like the Danish Farbror, Mor- 
bror (Fader-Broder, Moder-Broder), but this explanation will not 
apply to the earlier examples I have given, or to numerous instances of a later 
date. Thus in the Paston Letters, I. 6.: "for his sou'eyn lady sake ;" I. 118, 
"on Seint Simon day and Jude; " I. 122: "such as most have intrest in the 
Lord Wyllughby Goodes." II. 298: " my brother Roaf asent." 



INTRODUCTION OF ITS. 399 

lion of the new form its as a substitute. Accordingly, for 
the first half of that century, many of the best writers re- 
ject them both, and I think English folios can be found, 
which do not contain a single example of either. Of it, 
thereof, and longer circumlocutions were preferred, or the 
very idea of the possessive relation was avoided altogether. 
Although Sir Thomas Browne, writing about 1660, some 
times has its five or six times on one page, yet few authors 
of an earlier date freely use this possessive, and I do not re- 
member meeting it very frequently in any writer older than 
T. Hey wood. Ben Jonson indeed employs its in his works, 
but does not recognize it in his Grammar. It occurs rarely in 
Milton's prose, and not above three or four times in his poet- 
ry. Walton commonly employs his instead. Fuller has its 
in some of his works, in others he rejects it, and in the Pis- 
gah Sight of Palestine, printed in 16.50, both forms are some- 
times applied to a neuter noun in the course of a single sen- 
tence.* Sir Thomas Browne, on the other hand, rarely, if 
ever, employs his as a neuter, and I think that after the Res- 
toration in 1660, scarcely any instances occur of the use of 
the old possessive for the newly-formed inflection. It is some- 
what singular that the neuter possessive did not appear till 
long after the grammatical change with respect to gender 
had taken place in literature, but the explanation is to be 
found partly in a repugnance to the introduction of new in- 
flections, and. partly in the fact that the old application of 
genders was kept up in the spoken language long after it had. 



* " Many miles hence, this river solitarily runs on as sensible of its sad fate 
suddenly to fall into the Dead Sea, at Ashdoth-Pisgah, where all his comfort is 
to have the company of two other brooks," Book It. 58. 

u Whether from the violence of winds then blowing on its stream, and ang 
ring it beyond his banks." Book II. 59. 



£00 INTRODUCTION OF ITS. 

become extinct in the written. Indeed, they are still applied 
to inanimate objects, in the same confused way, in some Eng- 
lish provincial dialects ; and, even apart from the poetical 
vocabulary, traces of the same practice exist among ns to 
this clay. The indiscriminate attribution of the three gen 
ders, as in Anglo-Saxon and German, or of the masculine and 
feminine, as in French and Italian, to inanimate objects, is 
philosophically a blemish, and practically a serious incon- 
venience, in those languages, and it is a great improvement 
in English that it has simplified its grammar, by rejecting so 
superfluous, unmeaning and embarrassing a subtlety. 

A singular obsolete corruption in the syntax of our 
mother-tongue was revived not far from the period of the 
introduction of its, and it has been usually ascribed to a 
passion for generalizing the laws of language before its facts 
were well ascertained. Two centuries since it was common 
to write John his stick, Mary her hook, and the like. Ben 
Jonson says, that " nouns in z, s, sh, g, and oh, make, in the 
possessive singular, is, in the plural, es" "which distinc- 
tion," continues he, " not observed, brought in the monstrous 
syntax of the pronoun his joining with a noun betokening 
a possessor, as the prince his house."* The practice appears 
to have been founded on the grammatical theory that s, as a 
sign of the possessive case, was a contraction of the possessive 

* Harvey, in 1580, in his reply to Immerito (Spenser), speaking of English 
Orthography says: " But see what absurdities thys yl fauoured Orthograpbye, or 
ather Pseudography, hath ingendered ; and howe one errour still breedeth and 
oegetteth an other. Have wee not Moonefch, for Moonthe ; sithence, for since; 
whilest, for whilste ; phantasie, for phansie ; euen for evn; diuel, for divl; God 
hys wrathe, for Godd.es wrath; and a thousande of the same stampe, wherein the 
corrupte Orthography in the moste hath beene the sole, or principall cause of 
corrupte Prosodye in ouer many." Mulcaster, in 1582, remarks on this form: 
"Neither do I se anie cause whcr to use his, saving after words which end in a, 
as ' Socrates his councell was this, Platoes that, and Arisiotles this.' " 



HIS AS A POSSESSIVE SIGN. 401 

pronoun his. But it is argued that those who introduced the 
innovation did not remember that s was the sign of the pos- 
sessive in feminine as well as in masculine nouns, and in the 
plural number of the strong inflection also, in neither of 
which cases could it have been originally a contraction of his. 
They should have further considered, it is added, that upon 
this theory, the ,9 final of the possessive pronouns hers and 
theirs must in like manner have been derived from his, which 
is a manifest absurdity, and that the s in his itself, which is 
evidently an inflected form of the nominative masculine per- 
sonal pronoun he, could not be thus explained. As I have 
just remarked, his is the Anglo-Saxon possessive form of the 
pronoun for both the masculine and neuter genders, the fem- 
inine having anciently had the form hire, nearly corre- 
sponding to the modern her. It should be added that the s 
final is the earliest known sign of the possessive or genitive 
case in most of the languages of the Indo-European stock, 
and it may fairly be insisted, that, for the present, this is to 
be received as an ultimate grammatical fact, not at this time 
admitting of etymological explanation."* 

There is a striking analogous fact in the modern history 
of the Gothic languages, which cannot be passed over. I 
refer to the nearly contemporaneous introduction of a pre- 
cisely similar syntactical form in the Swedish, Danish and 
German, all of which in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
turies very frequently employed the possessive pronoun, in 
the masculine and feminine genders, and both numbers, as 
the sign of the genitive case of the noun. In these dialects, 
there is the same discrepancy between the primitive form and 



* See Note at the end of Lecture. 
26 



402 ENGLISH fOSSESSIVE. 

the modern substitute, and e ren a greater difficulty in sup- 
posing the usual genitive sign to be derived from the posses- 
sive pronoun. This use of the pronoun is generally if not 
always confined to proper names, whereas in English it was 
applied also to common nouns, and in the former case it seems 
to have originated in the difficulty of declining foreign names 
with the native inflection. A similar device was sometimes 
resorted to in the Latin of that day, in the syntax of modern 
proper names, and I think it probable that the Gothic lan- 
guages borrowed it from this corrupt Latin form, for there is 
little reason to suppose that they could all have taken it from 
the syntax of the one among them which first introduced it. 

If, how T ever, further investigation shall show that it spon- 
taneously originated in any two or more of them, the fact 
becomes very important, and it would be fair to regard it aa 
an expression of the linguistic sense of the Gothic race en- 
titled to no little weight as an evidence that, in spite of the 
difficulty of reconciling the forms, the real origin of the 
Gothic genitive or possessive inflection is to be found in a 
coalescence of the noun and the possessive pronoun.* 

The rejection of inflections, and especially the want of a 
passive voice, has compelled the use of some very complex 
and awkward expressions. The phrases I am told, he had 
been gone half an hour, strike foreigners as particularly mon- 

* The grammar of the Moeso-Gothic presents a case of resemblance between 
the genitive of the personal pronouns, which serves as a possessive, and the 
genitive or possessive case of certain nouns and adjectives. The genitive sin- 
gular of the personal pronoun is masc. is, fern, izos, neut. is. The genitive 
singular of a numerous class of masculine nouns ends in is; as worn, wigs^ 
gen. wigis. The same case of many feminines ends in jos or os; as nom. 
piudangardi, gen. piudangardj os. Thus far, there is a certain likenesa 
between the possessive of the pronoun and the possessive ending of the noun, 
but the coincidences are too few to authorize the supposition that the ending in 



ANOMALOUS CONSTRUCTIONS. 403 

Atrous. Sucli combinations as "he was giii i a commission 
in a new regiment " are employed by some of the best writers 
of the present day, as well as by those of an earlier period.* 
I iind, in a late discourse by an eminent divine, a recommen- 
dation to literary men to acquire some manual occupation 
" which may be-fallen-bach-upon in case of need ; " and Cole 
ridge speaks of an impediment to " men's turning their 
minds inwards upon themselves." " Such a thing has been 
gone-through-with" "it ought to-he-taJcen-?iotice-qf" " it ought 
not to-be-lost-sight-cf" are really compound, or rather agglu- 
tinate passives, and the number of such will probably rather 
increase than diminish. They make the language not less 
intelligible, but less artistic ; less poetical, but not less prac 
tical, and they are therefore fully in accordance with those 
undefined tendencies which constitute the present drift of 
the English language. 

Note to P. 401. — Notwithstanding these arguments, some able philologists 
are of opinion that, however corresponding forms are to be explained elsewhere, 
a as the sign of the possessive in English nouns is derived from, and truly repre- 
sents, the possessive Dronoun his, and hence it is important to examine the his- 



question was formed by a coalescence of the noun and pronoun, for in most 
Mceso-Gothio nouns, the possessive form admits of no such explanation. Be- 
tween the genitive of the adjective and the pronoun, the resemblance is much 
Btronger. Take the indefinite form of the adjective gods, good. 



Masc. 


Fem. 






Neut. 


Nom. gods, 


goda, 


go 


d 


, godata. 


Gen. godis, 


go daizos, 






godis. 


So superlative batists, best. 










Norn, batists, 


b a t i s t a , 






batist. 


Gen. batistis, 


batistaizos, 






batistis. 



* Lord Berners, in his translation of Froissart, Vol. I., ctap. 39, says: "I 
teas shewed the gleave." Gibbon, Vol. I., chap. VII., observes of Maximin, " he 
had been denied admittance. 



4:04c NOTE. 

tory of the form in question, though this cannot be done satisfactorily withou* 
recurring to manuscript authorities inaccessible to the American scholar. 

The s or '« cannot be proved to represent, or stand for his, unless it can be 
shown that Ms was employed as the sign of the possessive case in English before 
the use of the ending s or '*. How far back then can we trace the employment 
of his for that purpose ? 

It is stated by Latham that the expression u for Jesus Christ his sake," in the 
Liturgy of the English Church, is "the only foundation for the assertion" that 
the genitive characteristic s is a contraction of the possessive pronoun his. The 
meaning of the grammarian is not clear, but if he intends to say, as he seema 
to do, that this form of the possessive is not older than that liturgy, he is cer- 
tainly in error, although indeed the revived use of it cannot be positively traced 
to a much earlier period. 

There is, so far as I am aware, no evidence of the employment of the pos- 
sessive pronoun as a possessive sign in any stage of classical Anglo-Saxon. A 
large proportion of the nouns in that language, composing the second and third 
declension of Rask, the first of Klipstein, made the genitive or possessive in es, 
or sometimes as, and even ys, and in the transition to English, s or 's became 
the general possessive form for nouns of all the declensions. In the oldest manu 
script of Layamon, the last important Anglo-Saxon, or rather Semi-Saxon work, 
a manuscript of the early part of the thirteenth century, and probably nearly 
of the author's time — there are two examples of the use of his as the sign of 
the possessive of proper names. In another text, written, as is supposed, fifty 
years later, his is generally substituted for the es of the older manuscript, and 
is used, in a few cases, even with common nouns ; but it is remarkable, that in 
the two instances where the older text has his (I. pp. 175, 279,) the correspond- 
ing passages in the later have the regular possessive in es. 

In the Ormulum, which I think must be regarded as English rather than 
Semi-Saxon, and if so, then the earliest specimen of English, the possessive of 
nouns, as well as the plural number, is formed by the addition of s (or rather, in 
accordance with the peculiar orthography of the author, of two ss,) without the 
apostrophe, and the pronoun never supplies its place. In the proclamation of 
Henry III., (1258,) the possessive is made in s or es. In Robert of Glouces- 
ter, at least in Hearne's edition of 1724, the possessive is almost invariably 
formed by the addition of 's or e's to the radical, but there are a very few casea 
where ys is used as the possessive sign, and printed separately from the noun t 
Thus, at page 64 : 

be hauene per he was y slawe, aftur Haym ys name y wys, 
Hamptone was y clepud, as he yet y clepud ys. 

The pronoun his is printed in this edition, indifferently, his, hys, and ys, and 
therefore in the example 1" have cited, ys may possibly be a pronoun, but the 
mere separation of this syllable from the root in the manuscript does not prove 
it to be so, for the participial and preterite augment y, as in y slawe, y clepud 
in the above couplet, the prefix bi, as in bi het, bi hue, bi com, bi gan, the prefi* 



NOTE. 405 

*, (Latin ad,) as it i cent for assent, and in a passage from a different manu- 
script, p. 611, the j ural sign is in peny is, are separated from tbe root. 

No example of jhis construction has been observed in Piers Ploughman, 
Gower, Chaucer, or the Wyclimte versions, but three apparent instances occur 
in Torrente of Portugal, at verses 380, 1384, and 1902 ; the devylle ys hed, 
But it be for Jhesu is sake, and ffor Jeshu is love. These, however, are incon- 
clusive, for the same reason as those cited from Robert of Gloucester. The 
ending in ys is often *ound about this period, in pronouns where it could not 
have been derived from his or hys, as in one of the Paston letters, (Vol. I., 4(3,) 
written in 1470, in which hers is spelt hyrrys, ai'd ours, howrys, and the plural 
of nouns very often tawes this ending. The form " my Lord Bedford ys godes," 
in the Paston Letters, I. 122, "to my Alaistr ys place," I. 198, are probably 
mere orthographical eirors, as they are contrary to the almost uniform usaga 
in that collection. 

In the Morte d'Arthur, first printed in 1485, tenth book, chapter thirty-fifth, 
I find this passage : " Beware, Kynge Mavke, and come not nyghe me, for wete 
thou wel that I saued Alysander his lyf" and there is a more equivocal instance 
in the seventh chapter of the fourth book : "This lord of this castel his name 
is Sir Damas." In general, the possessive is formed in this work as in modern 
times, but always without the apostrophe. 

The earliest examples I have met with of the free and constant use of his as 
a possessive sign are in the continuation of Fabyan's Chronicle, commencing 
with the reign of Henry VIII. and printed in 1542, pp. 696, 699, 701, 702, and 
elsewhere, of Ellis's reprint, but it is remarkable that in the previous parts of 
that Chronicle, this construction does not occur. 

In the Confutacyon of Tyudale's Aunswere, made anno 1532, by Syr Thomas 
More, p. 343 of the edition of 1557, I find this passage, " him have they sette on 
«aynt Mathie hys even by the name of S;iynt Thomas the Martyr ; " and on p. 
597, "for conclusion of David hys dedes." It is possible that the form of the 
possessive may, in these instances, have been changed by the editor, so as to 
accord with the new usage, but if genuine, they date further back than the ex- 
amples from Fabyan's Chronicle. 

An instance of the use of the plural possessive pronoun as the sign of the 
possessive case of a noun occurs in a letter written in 1528, and printed at page 
44 of the Introduction to Bagster's English Hexapla : "I did promys him X 1. 
sterling to praie for my father & mother there sowles, and al cristeu sowles." 
This example, indeed, proves nothing directly with regard to the origin of the 
possessive sign s, but this instance and those cited from Layamon, the Morte 
d'Arthur, Fab van, and More, show that the possessive pronoun was, to some 
extent, regarded as the grammatical equivalent of the possessive sign, before 
the date of the English Liturgy. 

Doubtless the number of such examples might be increased by further re 
search, but they are too few and too much at variance with the almost universal 
usage of the language before the sixteenth century, and its known historical 
etymology, to serve as a foundation for a grammatical theory. If they are any 



406 NOTE. 

thins: more than accidental departures from the regular form, t.tey, ai most, 
only prove that particular English writers confounded the possessive pronoun 
with the possessive sign. Even this conclusion is rendered less probable by the 
fact that no instance of the corresponding use of her, or, with the single ex- 
ception which I have cited from the letter of 1528, of their, is known to occur 
until about 1560. Palsgrave expressly says that the possessive is formed by 
adding s (or is) to the noun ; and he does not himself in any case employ the 
pronoun for this purpose, nor does Gil, in his Logonomia, notice any but the 
inflected possessive. The apostrophe before the s in Eobert of Gloucester was 
probably introduced to make the distinction between the possessive singular 
and the plural number, a device, which, when the new plural form in « was 
hardly yet colloquially established, might be a convenience, if not a necessity. 

Upon the whole, then, I think we are authorized to say that the theory which 
makes the possessive sign s a derivative or contraction of the possessive pro- 
noun his, in English etymology, is without historical evidence or probable anal- 
ogy to support it. 

I regret that I have been unable to consult two articles mentioned by Sir F. 
Madden, in the Glossarial Remarks to Layamon, Vol. III., p. 451, one in the 
Critical Review for 1777, vol. XLIII., p. 10, the other in the Cambridge Phil. 
Museum, Vol. II., as a simple reference to them might perhaps have saved a 
discussion which the statement of Latham and the opinions of some other gram- 
marians seemed to render necessary. See App. 57. 



LECTURE XIX. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS AFFECTED BY THE ART OF PRINTING. 

I. 

The material conditions to which the art of book-making, 
in all its branches, is subject, have not only been powerfully 
instrumental in the modification of single words, and in deter- 
mining those minor questions, upon which the ready and 
commodious use of a written or printed volume depends, but 
they have exerted an important influence upon the more gen- 
ral forms of literature, and even upon the character and ten- 
dency of mental action. Let me illustrate by a comparison 
between the ancient and modern methods of recording the 
processes and results of human thought. The oldest manu- 
scripts have scarcely a single point of resemblance to modern 
books. The Latin word volumen, (whence our volume,) 
derived from the verb volvo, I turn or roll, indicates the 
most usual form of the ancient book. It was a long, narrow 
roll of parchment or papyrus generally divided transversely 
into pages or columns, the words written closely together 
without any separation by spaces, without distinctive forms 
of letters, capitals being employed for all purposes alike, 
without marks of punctuation, without divisions of chapters, 



408 



ANCIENT BOOXS. 



paragraphs or periods, and frequently made still more illegi- 
ble by complicated and obscure abbreviations or contractions 
of whole syllables, or even words, into a single character. 
The modern book is an assemblage of leaves, of convenient 
form and dimensions, securely united at one edge, with 
pages regularly numbered, impressed with characters of dif- 
ferent, but fixed forms, according to their several uses, words 
separated by spaces, members of the periods, and the periods 
themselves, distinguished by appropriate points, and the 
whole cut up into paragraphs, sections and chapters, accord- 
ing to the natural divisions of the subject, or the convenience 
of the writer, printer or reader, and, finally, abundantly pro- 
vided with explanatory notes and references, and ample 
tables of contents and indexes. 

It may not be here irrelevant to make a remark or two on 
the etymology of the Latin and English words for book. 
Yo lumen, derived as I have just said from volvo, is a 
younger and less common Latin name for book than either 
liber, the generic term for all books, or codex, properly 
the specific designation of manuscripts composed of leaves 
of any material, while volumen was the proper appellation 
of the roll. The word liber, (whence our library,) origi- 
nally signifying the inner bark of trees, was applied to books, 
because bark was one of the earliest materials on which the 
Latin people wrote. Codex, or caudex, whence our code, 
signifies the trunk or stem of a tree. Thin tablets of wood, 
split from the stem and covered with a layer of wax, at a 
very early period supplied the place of the more modern 
papyrus, parchment and paper, the writing being inscribed 
upon the wax with a hard point or style. 

The Gothic tribes also used slips of wood for the same 



FORMS OF BOCJKS. 409 

purpose, and the wood of the heech being found best adapted 
for writing-tablets, its primitive name (in Anglo-Saxon, b o c , ) 
became the designation of the most important object formed 
from it, and hence our English hook, and the German B u c h . 
It is a probable suggestion, that the form now universally 
adopted for the book owes its origin to the employment of 
wood or of leaden tablets in this way. Slips of wood could 
not well make a roll, and if connected at all, they would nat- 
urally be gathered like leaves of modern paper. The Upsal 
copy of the Moeso-Gothic translation of the Gospels, generally 
known as the Codex Argenteus, believed to be of the 
fifth, or beginning of the sixth century, and one of the oldest 
parchments existing, is written on leaves of vellum arranged 
in book-fashion, as are also most of the Greek and Latin 
manuscripts now extant, the superior convenience of that 
form having led to its general adoption not far from the 
commencement of the Christian era, though the Herculaneau 
and Egyptian papyri are all rolls. 

To an unpractised eye, however familiar with the indi- 
vidual characters, an ancient manuscript or inscription is but 
a confused and indistinct succession of letters, and no little 
experience is required to enable us readily to group these let- 
ters into syllables, the syllables into words, and to combine 
the words into separate periods. Indeed, the accidental 
omission of a space in printing between two successive words 
in our own language sometimes seriously embarrasses us, and 
if a whole sentence were thus printed, we should find it al- 
most as unintelligible as a complicated cipher.* 

* The following sentence from Fuller's Worthies will serve to show the dif 
ficulty of reading an unbroken succession of words : 

Itwillposethebkstclerktoreadyeatospelltiiatdeedwhereinsentencesclaus 
eswordsandlettersarewithoutpointsorstopsallcon'tinuedtogether. 



4:10 FOEMS OF BOOKS. 

An ancient scholar, on the other hand, would bt Hardly 
less puzzled, were he to be asked to read a composition, even 
of his own, divided and arranged according to the rules of 
modern typography. He would be distracted with the vari- 
ety of characters, capitals, small letters, and italics, with the 
multiplicity of marks of punctuation, and the shattering of 
the periods into fragmentary members ; perplexed with the 
often illogical divisions of the sentences and chapters, and 
embarrassed by the constant recurrence of references and 
annotations, all which would seem to him to serve little other 
purpose than to break the continuity of argument or nar- 
ration, and to divert the attention of the reader from closely 
following the thoughts of his author. We may find an illus- 
tration of this in the unhappy dislocation and confusion of 
the narratives of the evangelists, by the division into chapter 
and verse, so injudiciously executed by Stephens, in the six- 
teenth century, and unwisely followed in all more recent 
translations. If we read the Gospels as they were written, 
each as a continuous whole, we gain a very different im- 
pression from that derived from perusing them as we habit- 
ually do, in fragmentary sections and periods, and in fact, 
the restoration of the ancient integrity of form is almost the 
only change, which most scholars would willingly see made 
in our English New Testament. 

Manuscript, indeed, even in our own language, can never 
be read in the thoughtless, half-mechanical way, in which we 
skim over the pages of a modern romance, or the columns of 
a newspaper, for the finest, clearest and most uniform chirog- 
raphy falls short of the regularity and easy legibility of 
typography, and the highest compliment we can pay a hand 
writing is to say that it reads like print. 



ILLEGIBILITY OF MANTTSCKIPT. 411 

The Oriental nations, whose manuscripts resemble those of 
the ancients in wanting capitals, italics and punctuation, are 
leisurely readers, and as they follow the writing with the eye, 
they very frequently articulate the words, or at least move 
the lips, as we are apt to do in deciphering a difficult chirog- 
raphy. Indeed, such is the difficulty of reading manuscript so 
penned, that in cases where etiquette or other reasons require 
a written instead of a verbal message, the letter is sometimes 
accompanied by a reader to explain its purport to the recipi- 
ent. A curious passage in the Confessions of St. Augustine 
seems to imply that the ancients usually articulated the words 
in their private reading ; for it is remarked as a note-worthy 
particular in the habits of St. Ambrose, that he read by the 
eye alone, when engaged in private study. 

" When Ambrose was reading," says Augustine, " his eye 
passed over the page, and his mind searched out the sense of 
his author, but his organs of speech were silent. We often 
saw him studying in this inaudible way, and never otherwise, 
and we supposed that he feared, that if he read aloud, he 
should be interrupted by those who heard him with questions 
about the meaning of obscure passages ; or, perhaps, the de- 
sire of sparing his voice, which was easily fatigued, was a 
still better reason for this silent study."* 

But the ancient habits of thought were wholly irreconcil- 
able with the inconsecutive, discontinuous style of relation 
or discussion and expression so prevalent in our time. Sen- 
tentious, indeed, and highly elliptical the classical writers 
often were, but the thoughts were nevertheless consequent, 
and logically connected, though some links of the chain 
might be left to the reader's sagacity to supply. Besides 

* Conf. Lib. VI., § 3. 



412 MODERN HABITS OF THOUGHT. 

this, the fulness of the ancient inflections was a sure guide 
through the intricacies of the most involved period, and 
hence the Greeks and Romans did not require those multi- 
plied helps to easy reading which shallow thinking demands, 
and the habitual use of which so weakens the intelligence, 
that a constant craving for additional facilities is felt, and 
every year adds some new device for relieving the brain, at 
the expense of the eye-sight, in the mechanical arrangement 
of recorded words. That this ocular dissection, this material 
anatomy of language, has had an important influence on our 
modern European tongues, and on the current of the thought 
of which those languages are the vehicles, there is little 
doubt. It is true, that in the decline of ancient literature, 
the convenience of snch devices, superfluous in more intellec- 
tual ages, began to be felt, especially in the reading of older 
authors, whose dialect was becoming more or less obsolete. 
The invention of many of them is due to the Alexandrian 
grammarians, a school of critics and commentators who occu- 
pied themselves much with the elucidation of the earlier 
Greek writers, and who are said to have introduced the Greek 
accents, and some other points, to facilitate the teaching of 
the language to foreigners, as well as the instruction of the 
young in reading. Their obvious adaptation to this purpose 
naturally secured them a ready reception in primary schools 
and higher seminaries, and in fact, as we learn from Diony- 
sius of Halicarnassus, the difficulty of learning to read manu- 
script was so great, that it was necessary for the pupil to re- 
ceive some grammatical instruction before taking reading les- 
sons, obviously to enable him the more readily to separate an 
unbroken period into its component words. " We begin," 
&ays Dionysius (de Admir. vi die. in Demosthene, 52), " by 



ANCIENT TEACHING. 413 

committing to memory the names of the elements of speech 
called letters."* " After learning these names, we are tanght 
the forms said powers of the single letters, then their combi- 
nation into syllables, and the conditions which affect sylla- 
bles. Having mastered these elements, we learn the parts of 
speech, such as nonns, verbs, conjunctions and the like ; and 
when we are able to distinguish these, then we begin to write 
and to read, pronouncing the words slowly at first, and syl- 
lable by syllable, until rendered familiar by practice." The 
introduction of marks of punctuation into Latin manuscript 
was specially favored by the inflexible character of the Latin 
language, which inexorably demands a periodic structure, 
and, like a true pedagogue, pedantically insists that the 
reader shall parse every word, in order to master the sen- 
tence. Once employed, they become indispensable. Begin- 
ning with air-bladders, we never learn to swim without 
them. Every parenthesis must have its landmarks, every 
turn of phrase its finger-post. "We think by commas, semi- 
colons and periods, and the free movements of a Demos- 
thenes or a Thucydides are as unlike the measured, balanced 
tread of a modern orator or historical narrator, as the flight 
of an eagle to the lock-step of a prison convict, or to the 
march of a well-drilled soldier, who can plant his foot only 
at the tap of the drum. "We are not content with a punctu- 
ation which marks the beginning and end of a period, sepa- 
rates its members, and distinguishes parenthetical qualifica- 
tions. We require that it shall indicate the rhetorical char- 

* Athenreus, citing Callias, ( X., 19, p. 453,) informs us that the names of 
the letters, and even the spelling of syllables, were arranged metrically, doubtless 
us a help to the memory. 

Etrr' &k(pa, fir\Ta, yd/j.fia, SeAra, Seov irdp e?, &c. 
See Becker, Charicles, II., 33. 



4:14 PUNCTUATION. 

acter of the sentence. If it is vocative, ejaculatoiy, optative; 
interjectional, it must hoist an exclamation point as a signal. 
If it is hypothetical or interrogative, it must announce 
itself by a mark of interrogation ; and the Spaniards carry 
the point so far that, in their typography, these signs precede, 
as well as follow the sentence. 

There is a necessity, or at least an apology, for the use of 
punctuation in most modern languages, English especially, but 
which applies with less force to Greek and Latin. I refer to 
the otherwise inevitable obscurity of long sentences, in lan- 
guages where the relations of the constituent words are not 
determined by inflection, but almost wholly by position. 
The use of commas, semicolons and brackets, supplies the 
place of inflections, and enables us to introduce, without dan- 
ger of equivocation, qualifications, illustrations and paren- 
thetical limitations, which, with our English syntax, would 
render a long period almost unintelligible, unless its members 
were divided by marks of punctuation. Without this aux- 
iliary, we should be obliged to make our written style much 
more disjointed than it now is, the sentences would be cut up 
into a multitude of distinct propositions, and the leading 
thought consequently often separated from its incidents and 
its adjuncts. The practice of thus framing our written stylo 
cannot but materially influence our use of language as a me- 
dium of unspoken thought, and, of course, our habits of 
intellectual conception and ratiocination. It is an advantage 
of no mean importance to be able to grasp in one grammati- 
cal expression a general truth, with the necessary limitations, 
qualifications and conditions, which its practical application 
requires, and the habitual omission of which characterizes 
the shallow thinker ; and hence the involution and concentra- 
tion of thought and style, which punctuation facilitates, is 



MECHANICAL CONDITIONS. 415 

valuable as an antidote to the many distracting influences 
of modern social life. On the other hand, the principles of 
punctuation are subtle, and an exact logical training is 
requisite for the just application of them. Naturally, then, 
mistakes in the use of points, as of all the elements of lan- 
guage, written and spoken, are frequent, so much so, in fact 
that in the construction of private contracts, and even of 
statutes, judicial tribunals do not much regard punctuation ; 
and some eminent jurists have thought that legislative enact- 
ments and public documents should be without it. As a 
guide to the intonation in reading aloud, in a language which 
has so few grammatical landmarks as English, it is invalua- 
ble, for it is as true in our days as it was in Chaucer's, that — ■ 

A reader that pointeth ill 

A good sentence may oft spill. 

The art of printing has its special conditions and limita- 
tions, which have affected language in a variety of ways. 
Every person who writes for publication finds that the form 
and arrangement of his matter must often be controlled by 
what are called ' printer's reasons ;' and similar considera- 
tions of mechanical necessity, convenience, routine or preju- 
dice, exert a still more important influence on questions of 
punctuation, orthography, and even expression. The matter 
of the writer, or ' copy,' as it is technically called, must be 
accommodated to the space to be filled, and abridged or ex- 
tended accordingly. If you volunteer to enlighten your fel 
low citizens through the pages of a daily, you may be told 
that but half a column can be spared for your article, and 
you must consent to cut down your lucubrations to that stand- 
ard, or allow them to be printed in a crowded and microscopic 
type. If you are a regular contributor to a magazine or a 



4:16 MECHANICAL CONDITIONS. 

newspaper, you will often be called upon, quite mal-a-propos, 
to extemporize twenty lines of small pica, or to decide which 
stanza of your poem shall be omitted, that it may not over- 
run the page, and when you publish a book, you will be 
requested to confine your preliminary tete-a-tete with your 
reader to the exact limits of the printer's ' form.' 

In the early history of printing, books sometimes under- 
went strange changes from analogous causes. Fonts of type 
were often so small that a large volume was necessarily dis- 
tributed among several offices to be printed. It would in 
this case be impossible to determine precisely how many 
printed pages a given quantity of manuscript would fill, and 
of course the printer who took the latter portion of the copy, 
must labor under a good deal of uncertainty as to the paging 
and signatures of his sheets. Hence, there would sometimes 
occur a considerable break between the last page of the first 
part, and the first page of the second, and this must either be 
left with an unseemly and suspicious blank or filled up with 
new or extraneous matter. Thus, in John Smith's Generall 
Historie of Virginia, 1624, there occurred in this way a hia- 
tus of ten pages, and the author partially fills it with compli- 
mentary verses addressed to him by several friends, making 
this apology for their introduction : 

" Now seeing there is this much Paper here to spare, that 
you should not be altogether cloyed with Prose ; such Yerses 
as my worthy Friends bestowed upon New England, I here 
present you, because with honestie I can neither reject nor 
omit their courtesies." 

In like manner the editor of Fuller's Worthies, published 
in 1662, excuses the irregularity of the paging by saying 
that, " the discounting of sheets to expedite the work at sev- 



MECHANICAL C0J7DITI0NS. 417 

eral presses hath occasioned the often mistake of the folios ; " 
and in Abel Redivivus, 1651, an erroneous computation, as 
to the space which manuscript would require, compelled the 
leaving of ten folios unpaged between page 440 and page 
441, from which point another press had undertaken the 
printing. 

It is however mainly in smaller matters, that the mechan- 
ical influence of the press is most conspicuous, if not most 
important. Not only what in the nomenclature of the art 
are called ' forms,' that is, the number of pages inclosed in a 
single frame and printed at one operation on one piece of 
paper, but the dimensions of the page, and, in printing prose, 
the length of the lines also, are inflexible, and our equally 
rigid characters cannot be crowded, superposed, or indefi- 
nitely extended by lengthening their horizontal lines, as they 
are in oriental books, to fit them to the breadth of the page, 
but if there is a deficiency or an excess of matter, something 
must be added or omitted. Modern ingenuity, it is true, has 
contrived methods of accommodation, or, to use a word char- 
acteristic of our times, of compromise, by which appearances 
may often be saved without a too palpable sacrifice of the 
author's or rather printer's principles of orthography and 
punctuation. But, at a somewhat earlier stage of the art, the 
convenience of the compositor overruled all things, and in 
spite of the improvements to which I have just alluded, there 
are few writers who do not even now sometimes suffer from 
the despotism of that redoubtable official. 

At the period when our language was in a more flux and 
unsettled condition, and the press was a less flexible instru- 
ment, if the words of the manuscript did not correspond 
exactly to the length of a line, and the difficulty could not be 
27 



4.18 UNIFORMITY OF ORTHOGRAPHY. 

remedied by the insertion or omission of printer's spaces, 
without leaving staring blanks or a crowded condition of the 
words at once distasteful to a typographical eye and perplex- 
ing to the reader, a comma might be dropped or introduced, 
a capital exchanged for a small letter, or vice versa. So if 
the author used a word the spelling of which was not wel 
settled, (and all modern orthography was doubtful three hun- 
dred years ago,) a letter or two might be added or omitted, to 
give it the proper length. This is the explanation of much 
of the irregular orthography which occurs in the older, and 
sometimes in more recent editions of printed books. The 
ingenuity of more modern printers, as I have already ob- 
served, has devised methods of removing or greatly lessening 
this embarrassment, chiefly by the dexterous use of spaces ; 
and the convenience of spelling and punctuating according 
to a uniform standard so greatly overbalances the difficulty 
of accommodating the matter to the page, that authors now 
complain, not that the printer's orthography is too variable, 
but that it is tyrannically inflexible. Landor, in his second 
conversation between Johnson and Tooke, tells us that 
Hume's orthography was overruled by his printers. He 
wrote the preterites and past participles of the weak verbs 
with a t final, as Milton did, as, for example, lookt for looked, 
but in his printed works, the compositor and publisher w T ould 
Buffer no such departure from the established laws of the 
chapel. An eminent French philological writer, w T hen ac- 
cused of violating his own principles of orthography in one 
of his printed essays, thus replies : " It was not I that printed 
my essay, it was Mr. Didot. Now Mr. Didot, I confess it 
with pain, is not of my opinion with regard to the spelling 
of certain plurals, and I cannot oblige him to print against 



UNIFORMITY OF OETHOGEAPHY. 419 

his conscience and his habits. You know that every printing 
office has its rules, its fixed system, from which it will not 
consent to depart. For example, I think the present fashion 
f punctuation detestable, because the points are multiplied 
to a ridiculous excess. "Well, I attempt to prove this by 
precept and example, and the very printers who publish my 
argument scatter points over it, as if they were shaken out 
of a pepper-box. It is their way. What would you have ! 
They will print my theory only on condition that I will sub- 
mit to their practice"* 

Habits of spelling soon become fixed. A bad speller 
cannot accurately copy a well-spelled manuscript, and if the 
apprentices in an office were not rigorously trained to an 
invariable system of spelling, the trouble they would occa- 
sion the proof-reader would be endless. Experience has 
shown that nothing is more difficult than to obtain an accu- 
rate reprint of an old edition, or the publishing of an old 
manuscript, with the original orthography ; and this is one 
reason why so many of the most valuable sources of informa- 
tion respecting the early forms and history of our language 
have never been made accessible by the press, and why later 
editors have rendered so many sterling old authors wholly 
valueless for all philological purposes, by changing or dis- 
guising their meaning, in the foolish attempt to fit them to 
the taste of the vulgar reader by modernizing their spelling, 
and conforming their supposed erroneous grammar to the 
practice of the hour. A writer of the present day, who 
quotes a couplet of Chaucer, must expect that the printer 
will reform the orthography according to the latest edition 
of Webster, and if, in the indulgence of a passion for the 

* Genin. Recreations Philologiques, I. 355. 



120 

archaic and the venerable, he venture to en. ploy an old 
fashioned form or an obsolescent word, the compositor, pity- 
ing his presumed ignorance or want of taste, will charitably 
amend the ' copy,' by substituting a word of a more current 
coinage. If, as has happened to the writer, he jestingly 
apply to a youth the old Euphuistic appellation of a ju- 
vciial, the printer will change his antiquated substantive into 
the adjective juven^g, and if he sing of a ' grisly ghost,' he 
may find his awe-inspiring, but somewhat vague epithet, 
rendered more precisely descriptive by being printed with 
two 2.* 

Eminent printers usually adopt some popular dictionary 
as a standard, and they allow the writers for whom they 
print no deviation from this authoritative canon. The dic- 
tionaries selected are often works of no real philological 
merit. The aim of their authors has been, not to present the 
language as it is, as the conjoined influence of uncontrollable 
circumstances and learned labor has made it, but as, accord- 
ing to their crude notions, it ought to be. Every word-col- 
lector aspires to be a reformer, and the corrections of popular 
orthography are more frequently based on false analogies 
and mistaken etymologies or erroneous principles of phonol- 
ogy, than founded in sound philological scholarship. In lan- 
guage, form is indistinguishable from substance, or rather is 
substance. The dictionary-maker and the printer, who lord 
it over the form of our words, control the grammar of our 
language, and the philosophy of its structure ; they suggest 
wrong etymologies and thereby give a new shade of meaning to 
words ; and in short exert over speech a sway not less abso- 
lute or more conducive to the interests of good taste and 

* See two translations from Matthisson in the Whig Review for 1845, 



421 

truth in language, than that which the rntdiste possesses in 
the fashion of dress.* 

It must "be admitted that the licenses of which I complain 
are older than the art of printing. Professional scribes, in 
ancient times and in the middle ages, habitually conformed 
the manuscripts they copied to the orthographical and gram- 
matical standard of their own times, and they regularly 
changed every obsolete or obscure word or form of expression 
for something more agreeable to the taste, or less enigmatical 
to the intelligence of their contemporaries. They often cor- 
rected supposed errors in names, dates, facts, or if, instead of 
venturing upon absolute change, they more conscientiously 
inserted an explanatory gloss or conjectural emendation in 
the margin, a later copyist would incorporate the note or cor- 
rection into the text. In manuscripts written in languages 
still spoken when a given copyf was made, we can never 
expect a near conformity to the words of the author, unless 

* Caxton, in the title page to his edition of Higden, (I am obliged to quote 
from a modernized version,) says the Chronicle was "Imprinted by William 
Caxton, after having somewhat changed the rude and old English, that is to wit, 
certain words which in these days be neither used nor understanden." And in 
another place : "And now at this time simply imprinted and set in form by me, 
William Caxton, and a little embellished from the old making." 

f The etymology of copy presents a striking instance of the extravagances 
into which inquirers, whose study of languages is confined to grammars and dic- 
tionaries, run, when they seek the origin of words, not in their history as traced 
in actual literature, but in resemblances gathered from lexicons. I find it stated 
in a well known dictionary, that copy is from cope, in the sense of likeness. 
Under cope no such meaning is given, the nearest approach to it being, " to ex- 
change or barter," but cope is said to be allied to the Arabic kafai, to be equal, 
to be like. 

Cope in the sense of exchanging or buying, is neither more nor less than 
the Anglo-Saxon c e a p i a n , to chafer, bargain or trade, whence also our chap- 
man and cheap. Copy is the Latin copia, signifying first, abundance, then 
facility or convenience, whence the phrase copiam fa cere alicujus, to 
furnish, grant, or communicate anything, from which latter form came the senst 
of "making a copy," as a mode of communicating a writing. 



4:22 LICENSES OF COPYISTS. 

the writing is an original, or at least a contemporaneous 
transcript ; and in the latter case, if the penman happened to 
be of a different province from that of the writer, dialectic 
differences are almost sure to occur. Thus, the oldest man- 
uscripts of Petrarch and Dante, and other Italian writers, 
seldom fail to betray the birthplace of the copyist, by th 
shibboleth of his local dialect. In like manner, when we 
compare manuscripts of the same work copied in successive 
centuries, we can trace the changes of the language almost 
as distinctly as in different original compositions of the corre- 
sponding periods.* 

We find an additional proof of the frequency and extent of 
the license indulged in by ancient copyists, in the comparison 
of the dialect of monumental inscriptions with that of literary 
works which have come down from the same periods. Our 
classical manuscripts, excepting those found at Herculaneum, 
and in a few instances in Egyptian mummy cases, are all 
comparatively modern. The forms of language in Greek and 
Latin inscriptions are generally much more archaic than in 
our copies of the works of contemporaneous writers. It is 
true, that something of the difference is to be ascribed to the 
influence of what is called the lapidary style, and its conse- 
crated standards of orthography and expression. Inscrip- 

* The manuscripts of Piers Ploughman vary so widely, that Whitaker can 
explain the discrepancies only by the supposition of a rifaccimento by the author 
himself, at a considerably later period, when his opinions had undergone im- 
portant changes ; but a comparison of Whitaker's and Wright's texts reveals so 
wide differences in grammar, vocabulary, and orthography, that it is quite un- 
reasonable to refer the two recensions to one writer, and it is by no means im« 
probable that both are very unlike the author's original. 

It is supposed that the two manuscripts of Layamon, so admirably edited by 
Sir F. Madden, do not differ more than half a century in their ages, but the de- 
partures of the later from the earlier text are too great to be accounted for, 
except by imputing to the copyist very great license in transcription. 



LICENSES OF COPYISTS. 423 

tions engraved on marble or on brass are necessarily brief, 
laconic, elliptical, and the rigidity of these materials pro- 
duced on old monumental writings effects analogous, in some 
respects, to those of the mechanical conditions of printing 
upon modern literature. Other differences are accounted for 
by the ignorance of the stone-cutters ; but after all, it is not 
probable that inscriptions commemorating the public acts 
of officers of high rank, or other important events, and of 
course executed under a responsible inspection, would differ 
very widely from the current grammatical forms or orthog- 
raphy of their time, and hence we must infer that copyists 
and editors have made considerable changes in the manu- 
scripts they published. The professional scribes at Home 
and Athens were often slaves, and, in the former city, no 
doubt generally much better educated than their masters. 
The booksellers kept numbers of such servile scribes, and 
many copies of a book were made at once, some one reading 
the manuscript aloud, and the penmen writing it down. 
Under such circumstances, independently of any deliberate 
purpose of modernizing or correcting the author, persons 
writing by the ear from dictation would inevitably reduce 
the work, whether old or new, to the standard orthography 
of the time, which they certainly might with quite as good 
right as editors in the nineteenth century mangle and dis- 
guise good old authors, for the purpose of making them more 
intelligible to a public which they suppose as ignorant as 
themselves. 

From all these circumstances, it is evident that nothing 
can assure us of possessing the ipsissima verba of an old 
writer but a comparison with the original manuscript, or one 
which has passed the author's revision. Happily for the 



424 CORRECTION OF MANUSCRIPTS. 

interests of literature, early English writers did not always 
trust their works to the tender mercies of the scribe with the 
superb indifference which Shakespeare is reported to have 
shown. Chaucer scrupulously revised the copies of his works, 
as appears from this address to his scribe. 

Adam Scrivener, if ever it thee befall, 
Boece or Troilus for to write new, 
Under thy long locks thou maist have the scall, 
But after my making thou write more trew. 
So oft a day I mete thy werke renew, 
It to correct and eke to rubbe and scrape, 
And all is thorow thy negligence and rape. 

The author of the Ormulum, one of the most interesting 
and valuable relics of our old literature, the original manu- 
script of which, written with a systematic uniformity of 
orthography very remarkable in the thirteenth century, is yet 
extant, gives this charge to the copyists who might attempt 
the multiplication of his work : 

& whase wilenn shall piss boc 

JKfFt operr sipe writenn, 
Hinira bidde ice pat het write rihht, 

Swa summ piss boc himm taechepp, 
Ail pwerrt ut affterr patt itt iss 

Uppo piss tirrste bisne, 
Wipp all swillc rime alls her iss sett, 

Wipp all se fele wordess ; 
& tatt he loke wel patt he 

An bocstaff write twiyyess, 
Eyywhaer paar itt uppo piss boc 

Iss writenn o patt wise. 
Loke he well patt het write swa, 

Forr he ne mayy nohht elless 
Onn Ennglissh writenn rihht te word 

patt wite he wel to sope.* 



And whoso willeth this my book 
To write again hereafter, 



TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE. 425 

It is one of the most interesting questions in all literature 
how far the original text of Shakespeare has suffered from 
the license, the negligence, or the indolence of those who, 
with type and pen have multiplied his works. The dispute 
is likely to be a long one, and if Collier's folio does not prove 
the existence of myriads of errors in the current editions, it 
at least shows an alarming boldness of commentators in the 
way of conjectural emendation. 

Him bid I, that he write it right, 

So as this book him teacheth, 
Throughout according as it is 

In this the first example, 
With all such rhythm as here is set, 

With words, eke, just so many; 
And let him look to it, that he 

Write twice each single letter, 
Wherever it, in this my book, 

In that wise is ywritten. 
Look he well that he write it «o, 

For otherwise he may not 
In English write the words aright, 

That, wete he well, is soothfast, 



LECTURE XX. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS AFFECTED BY THE ART OF PRINTING 

II. 

There are circumstances peculiar to the history of English 
literature, which have rendered the mechanical conditions 
and imperfections of the typographical art more powerfully 
influential upon the language itself, than was elsewhere, in 
general, the case. Caxton, the first English printer, was 
indeed both an Englishman by birth, and a man of scholarly 
attainments, but he acquired the art at Cologne, and it is 
probable, though not certain, that his first production, The 
Ilecuyell of the History es of Troye, was printed either at 
Cologne or at Bruges. When he established his press at 
"Westminster soon after the year 1470, he brought over work- 
men from the continent, and, were stronger evidence want- 
ing, the names of his successors, Lettou and Machlinia, Wyn- 
kyn de Worde, Pynson, Berthelette, Faques, Treveris, would 
sufficiently indicate that they also were of foreign birth. In- 
deed it appears from Strype's Memoirs of Cranmer,* that as 
late as 1537, the printers in England were generally " Dutch- 

* See Souther's Common Place Book, Vol. II. 



EAJRLY PRINTING IN ENGLAND. 427 

men that could neither speak nor write true English," and 
when Grafton applied for an exclusive privilege for the trans- 
lation of the Bible which goes by his name, he represented 
that " for covetonsness' sake, these foreign printers would 
not employ learned Englishmen to oversee and correct their 
work, 1 ' so that, as he complains, " paper, letter, ink, and cor- 
lection would be all naught." Three years later, Grafton 
asked permission to print the Bible at Paris, where he says 
that not only could he procure better and cheaper paper, but 
that the workmen were more skilful. Any one, who has 
had occasion to print so much as a familiar quotation in a 
foreign tongue can judge whether a volume printed in a lan- 
guage unknown to the compositor would be likely to prove 
very correct. Besides this, it must be remembered that the 
art of calligraphy had been less cultivated in England than 
on the continent, that the characters in common use differed 
somewhat from those employed in the other European lan- 
guages, and that the contractions and abbreviations stood, of 
course, for different combinations of sounds or letters. An 
instance of this is the employment of p and 6" for the two 
sounds of th, in the Anglo-Saxon and Old-English alphabets, 
a trace of which long remained in the confounding of p 
with y. In black-letter, the character y much resembles the 
f>, and hence y was often used instead of it, and this gave 
rise to the forms ye for the, and yt for that. Thus many cir- 
cumstances combined to make an English manuscript ex- 
tremely illegible to a printer unacquainted with the language. 
While in almost every Continental country, the early 
printers were generally learned men, and sometimes among 
the most eminent scholars of their time, the followers of 
Caxton were for nearly two centuries principally mere 



£28 EAELY PRINTING IN ENGLAND. 

handicraftsmen, and typography fell far short both of the 
dignity and the artistic perfection to which it elsewhere 
attained almost immediately after its invention. For all 
these reasons it is obvious that early English printed 
books must have been very unfaithful copies of the manu- 
scripts they attempted to reproduce, and the great incorrect- 
ness of their execution had a prejudicial effect upon the 
forms of the language and sometimes on the meaning and 
use of important words. There is a large class of words of 
Latin and French origin belonging to the dialect of books, 
and at first, of course, used exclusively by literary men, who 
could not be Ignorant of their etymology or true orthogra- 
phy, but which are found very vaguely spelled in the printed 
books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, the 
printers did not discriminate between eminent and imminent, 
^»rmdent and precedent, ingenious and ingenious, and these 
words were used or rather printed interchangeably almost to 
the beginning of the eighteenth century. A passage in Ful- 
ler, however, clearly marks the distinction between ingem^- 
ousness and ingenmty as then recognized, and it is not prob- 
able that scholars could ever have been insensible to the dif- 
ferences between all of them.* They must first have been 
confounded by typographical error. The confusion once 
introduced, educated men became involved in it, and it was 

* Though men understood imperfectly in this life, yet if all understood 
equally imperfectly, upon the supposition of equal ingenuousness to their inge- 
nuity, (that is, that they would readily embrace what appears true unto them,^ 
all would be of the same judgment. 

Infant's Advocate, Part II., p. 8. 

Does Trench, in treating of desynonymised words, (Study of Words, Lec- 
ture V., ) mean to say that ingenious, (Latin ingeniosus, proximately from 
ingenium,) and ingenwous, (Latin ingenuus, directly from the verbal root,) 
were ever really the same word ? 



CONTUSION OF SPELLING. 429 

long before the words and the ideas they exi ressed were dis« 
entangled from it. 

Printed books, however incorrect, would, from their 
greater legibility, always be preferred to manuscript, and 
their wide circulation would make them at once popular 
standards of authority in all matters of orthography and 
grammatical inflection. The confusion and irregularity of 
their spelling would accordingly powerfully tend to increase 
the uncertainty of orthography, especially at a period when 
the usage of the learned even was discordant, and the lan- 
guage still in process of formation. It is, no donbt, in these 
circumstances that we are to find the explanation of the 
otherwise paradoxical fact, that the spelling of the English 
language, as practised by educated persons in the fifteenth, 
and even the latter part of the fourteenth century, more 
nearly resembles that of the present day, than do the printed 
books of the sixteenth century. The foreign printers igno- 
rantly corrupted the spelling of their copy, and their books 
again the orthography of the nation.* In carefully executed 
recent editions, printed directly from very early manuscripts, 
we find a surprisingly close resemblance to the spelling of 
modern periods. In the best manuscripts of Chaucer, and 
more especially of Gower, and in some of the Paston letters, 
as, for example, in a letter of Lord Hastyngs written before 
the year 1480, we find indeed obsolete words, but the orthog- 



* Et si, huic non absiraile incommodum etiam accederet, ut praelo corrigendo 
non doctus praeesset sed aliquis de grege mercatorum qui Germanice et Anglicfc 
loqui posset, corrumpi necesse erat orthographiara nostrara ; et quia tempestiva 
medela adhibita non esset, in hominum usum corruptam transire. Atque hano 
sane existiino unicam fuisse causam corrupted. 

A. Gil. Logonomia Anglica, 2nd edition, 1621. 
Praefatio ad Lectorem. 



4:30 CONTUSION OF SPELLING. 

raphy of those which are still employed conforms mors 
closely to the present standard than does that of the English 
Bible of 1611.* The original edition of that translation fur- 
nishes abundant illustrations of a practice to which I referred 
in the last lecture, that, namely, of clipping or lengthening 
words according to the space which it was convenient to give 
them in arranging the printed lines. Thus in Deuteronomy 
ix. 19, hot is spelt mhot, because a long word was required 
to fill out the space ; in Joshua ix. 12, Judges ii. 14, iii. 
20, it is spelt hote, there being a smaller space to occupy, and 
in other passages, where the ordinary form hot was long 
enough, that spelling is employed. In verse 13, of chapter 
xiii. of Judges, ye and we are both printed with a single e, 
but in verse 15, of the same chapter, each with two ee. In 
verse 2 of chapter xv., the second person singular, imperfect 
tense of the verb to have, is spelt haddest, in Genesis xxx. 
30, hadst. In Genesis xxxi. 8, the future of the substan- 
tive verb to he is printed shall bee, with two 11 and two ee, but 
in chapter xxx., verse 33, it is printed in one word, shalbe, 

* See letter from Lord Hastyngs, Paston Letters, II., 296. Pauli, in the 
Introductory Essay to his edition of Gower's Confessio Amautis, London, 18o7, 
states, that he has adopted the "judicious and consistent orthography " of a 
manuscript probably of the end of the fourteenth century, " as the basis for the 
spelling in this new edition." He also describes the orthography of a manu- 
script of the same author, of the fifteenth century, as having been "carried 
through almost rigorously according to simple and reasonable principles." 
Pauli's text is founded on an edition by Berthelette, of the year 1532, but con- 
formed in its orthography to the first manuscript above mentioned. Berthelette 
printed from an edition by Caxton, but substituted the dialect and spelling of 
his own time, and carried the process of modernization still farther in a subse- 
quent edition. In that from which Pauli printed, the "orthography and metre 
had been disturbed in innumerable places by Berthelette," and he observes that 
in the oldest manuscripts, the promiscuous use of y and i, u and v, so common 
in all old English printed books, does not occur. The spelling of Pauli's edi- 
tion, thus restored to its original integrity, is, in a very large proportion of the 
words, identical with that of the present day. 



CONFUSION OF SPELLING. $31 

and both these forms occur in verse IT of chapter xlii. of 
Isaiah.* So in the life of Reynolds in Abel Redivivus, in one* 
sentence college and knowledge are spelt withont the e final, but 
in the next period, both words with it. These, and many more 
among the thousand similar variations in which early printed 
English books abound, were occasioned by the necessity of 
conforming the length of the words to the space that could 
be spared for them. The double forms toward and towards, 
which occur in King James's Bible, are explained in the same 
way, as also the employment or omission of the final s in 
other words of the same ending in other English books of 
that century. It should, however, be here observed, that, in 
all the words ending in -ward, which are used in the first edi- 
tions of that translation, with the exception of towards and 
afterwards, the s is constantly omitted, according to what 
seems to be the fashionable modern usage ; though, as I think, 
the s final ought to be retained in employing words with this 
ending as adverbs or prepositions, and dropped when they 
serve as adjectives. One of the most remarkable typograph- 
ical licenses I have observed, occurs in the life of Abbot in 
Abel Reclivivus, printed in 1651. At that period, our com- 
mon title of address, Mister, was spelt, and doubtless pro- 
nounced, Master, and hence, though the same abbreviation 
was used for the address as at present, namely Mr., the two 
significations of the word were liable to be confounded. The 
author of the life in question speaks of a particular work, as 
' Abbot's master-piece,' but the printer, for want of space, 

* The following fac-simile from one of the editions of 1611, shows the an 
pangement of two lines of the verse referred to, and the reason for it : 

17 € (Hijeg sljall bee *tarneb backe, 
tljctj aljalbe greatlti as'jamelr, ti)at trust 



432 CONFUSION OF SPELLING. 

has printed the abbreviation Mr., instead of the whole word 
master. A like example occurs in a letter from Harrington 
to Prince Henry in the Nugge Antiquse. In printing poetry, 
where the verses are seldom long enough to extend across 
the whole breadth of the page, the same necessity of adapt- 
ing the words to the space did not exist, and hence it is, that 
the spelling in old printed poems is sometimes more uniform 
than in contemporaneous prose. In old editions of Chancer, 
we find the orthography of the versified portions less irreg- 
ular than that of the Tale of Melibosus, and of the Persones 
Tale, both of which are in prose. It should, however, be 
remembered, that, in poetry, there existed a totally different 
cause of irregularity, not connected with the mechanical laws 
of the press. I refer to the necessities of metre. The final 
e of words with that termination was in Chaucer's time 
usually pronounced, at least in verse, as it still is in French 
poetry, and accordingly where not strictly inflectional, it was 
employed or dropped according to metrical convenience. 
Besides this, at that period, the Saxon inflections had not 
become wholly obsolete, and early English writers used the e 
final, as a sign of the plural in adjectives, and verbs of the 
strong conjugation, which in our modern dialect admit no 
change of form in different numbers. 

The near coincidence in time, between the Protestant Ref- 
ormation and the general diffusion of the art of printing in 
Europe, together with the close analogy between the intel- 
ectual influences of both, makes it a matter of great diffi- 
culty in many cases to determine which of these two causes 
was most active in the production of particular effects ; and 
especially, how far the change which the sixteenth century 
produced in all the European languages is to be ascribed tc 



PRINTING AND THE REFORMATION. 



433 



the one or the other of them. The year 1500 found the Eng 
lish language much as Chaucer and Wycliffe had left it ; in 
the year 1600, it had nearly reached the point where it now 
stands, so far as concerns the dialects of the knowledges then 
cultivated, except in the vocabulary of the physical sciences. 
The Tale of Meliboeus and the Persones Tale differ from the 
Morte d'Arthur, in Caxton's edition, only as English orig- 
inals, suggested and modified by the study of moral and theo- 
logical treatises in Latin, would be expected to differ from a 
translation of a French romantic fiction, but, independently 
of the coloring which each receives from these influences, 
and, from the nature of the subjects, the language will be 
found to be very nearly the same. But if we compare either 
of them with Hooker or Shakespeare, and again, the latter 
writers with the purest authors of the present day, we shall 
observe that the century between Caxton and Hooker ef- 
fected as great changes as the two hundred and iiffcy years 
that have elapsed since that great writer flourished. Al- 
though printing was introduced into England about 1470, 
yet the productions of the press were not sufficiently nu- 
merous to exert much influence on the national mind or 
speech, until half a century later. During the sixteenth cen- 
tury, printing and the Reformation promoted each other, 
and their action upon thought and language was a concur- 
rent one. Without attempting to define the relative weigiit 
of each, I may say that I think the most important single 
element, in producing the general effect of both upon the 
English language, was the diffusion of a knowledge of clas- 
sical literature, which printing made possible, and the Ref- 
orm ation made more desirable. The increased number and 
the reduced price of books in the Greek and Latin languages 
28 



4:34 DIALECT OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTUKY. 

released classical literature from the confinement of the clois 
ter, and private individuals of moderate means were now 
able to enjoy intellectual luxuries, which before had been 
accessible only to the wealth of monastic corporations. Man 
uscripts of the classics had been multiplied only for the ex- 
clusive use of those establishments, by monkish scribes whc 
occupied their leisure hours in the copying, or calligraphic 
and pictorial embellishment, of writings which had survived 
the wreck of yet more barbarous ages. The first tendency 
of this secularization of classic lore was undoubtedly unfavor- 
able to the cultivation of the popular literature and the ver- 
nacular speech, but a reaction soon commenced, and a new 
literature sprung up in the vulgar languages, though fash- 
ioned upon ancient models, affecting a classical structure, and 
marked by a Latinized phraseology. 

Until the end of the fifteenth century, it was only in the 
theological and moral departments, that Latin had much 
direct influence upon English, most of the Latin roots intro- 
duced into it up to that time having been borrowed from the 
French ; but as soon as the profane literature of Greece and 
Rome became known to English scholars through the press, 
a considerable influx of words drawn directly from the clas- 
sics took place. The introduction of this element produced a 
sort of fermentation in the English language, a strife between 
the new and the old, and both vocabulary and structure con- 
tinued in a very unstable state until the end of the sixteenth 
century, when English became settled in nearly its present 
form. In the productions of Caxton's press, and indeed in 
the literature of the period down to and including the time 
of Lord Berners, whose translation of Froissart, perhaps the 
best English prose that had yet been written, and certainly 



FREEDOM OP THE PRESS. 435 



the most delightful narrative work in the laiguage, first ap- 
peared in 1523, it is scarcely possible to find a single word 
of Latin origin, belonging to the general vocabulary of 
English, whose form does not render it most probable that we 
received it through the French. A hundred years later, on 
the contrary, we meet on every printed page, words either 
taken directly from the Latin, or, which is a very important 
point, if before- existing in our literature, reformed in orthog- 
raphy so as to suggest their classical origin. There is even 
in Hooker an evident struggle between the two great ele- 
ments of English, and in his hesitation between the Latin 
and the Saxon, or older English, he not unfrequently uses 
both, as for instance, " nocive or hurtful things," " unreason- 
able cecity and blindness" " rectitude or straightness" " sense 
and meaning ; " and so, in Gotta, " heartened and encour- 
aged" 

The influence of printing upon the English language has 
been much extended and strengthened by two important cir- 
cumstances, common to the two great countries of which it 
is the vernacular. The one is, that in neither does there 
exist, nor for two centuries has there existed, a censorship of 
the press, a previous authoritative examination of manuscript 
matter intended for the public ; the other is, that public dis- 
cussion of all questions in the departments of religion, of 
intellectual and moral philosophy, of politics, indeed of all 
topics affecting the great and permanent interests of man, is 
free and unrestricted. Hence the popular mind, the popular 
speech, in both countries are open to a class of influences, 
which, in most continental states, are confined to the privi- 
leged and the professional alone. For the same reason, the 
dialects appropriated to tlw elucidation of all these great sub- 



436 FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. 

jects Tiavc been very widely cultivated, and their vocabu 
laries enlarged, so that onr language has acquired a compass 
and an adaptability to an unlimited variety of uses which 
nothing but free speech and a free press could give to it. 
Late journals have stated that dramatic pieces designed for 
representation on the French stage were to be submitted to a 
censorship before acting, in order that slang phrases and 
other violations of the purity of language likely to offend 
academic ears might be struck out. We may easily imagine 
that the objects of such a censorship are rather political than 
literary, but in either case it could not fail to have a preju- 
dicial influence on the character of speech, with which change 
and progress are as essentially connected as motion with the 
due performance of the organic functions of animal life. 

The effect which the muzzling of the press and the conse- 
quent stifling of the free and public expression of opinion on 
theological questions has exerted on speech, may be seen by 
comparing the language of our English Bible and of English 
writings of a devotional character generally, with that of sim- 
ilar works in the tongues of central and Southern Europe. 
In none of these latter does there exist a special and well- 
defined religious dialect. Technical words for theological 
ideas, indeed, they have, but no phraseology so marked in itt 
composition and structure as to constitute an appropriate 
religious diction. The same thing is true, to nearly the same 
extent, of the general political vocabulary of the continent, 
though, on the other hand, the comparatively little occasion 
for the employment of English in diplomacy has left our lan- 
guage more undeveloped and incomplete in that special de- 
partment than in almost any other. 

Although the letters of Junius, and some of the writings 



CHARACTER OF PUBLIC. 437 

ot Cobbett, subjected their publishers to crimina prosecution 
in England, yet the press was nevertheless substantially free, 
and it was only by means of a free press, that productions sc 
bold in their political character, and so important in their 
literary influence, could have been given to the public. I 
speak without any reference to their moral or political merits 
or demerits, but it must be allowed that Junius did much to 
limit, Cobbett something to overthrow, the influence of the 
stilted Latinism of Johnson and his school, and to bring back 
the language, if not to a Saxon vocabulary, at least to an 
idiomatic grammatical structure. 

The influence of printing on the English language has 
been modified and determined by the peculiar character and 
circumstances of the people, by whom and for whom the lit- 
erature of England has been created. 

The deliberate expression of human thought will always 
assume a form supposed to be adapted to the intelligence 
the temper, the tastes, and the aims of those to whom it is 
addressed. He who speaks to an audience composed of men 
of one class, of one profession, of one party, or of one sect, 
will use a narrower vocabulary, a more restricted, or a more 
select dialect, than he who expects to be heard by a more 
various and comprehensive circle ; and a writer who appeals 
to a whole people, who seeks to convince the understanding, 
or enlist the sympathies of a nation, must adopt a diction, 
employ arguments, and resort to illustrations, which shall, in 
their turn, suit the comprehension and awaken the interest, 
of men of every class and every calling. Whatever, there- 
fore, is designed for the ear, or the perusal of what we call 
' the enlightened public,' must be as miscellaneous in its 
composition as that public itself, and it can come home to 
the bosoms of all, only by using both the speech which is 



4:38 SPKEAD OF ENGLISH. 

common to all, and somewhat of the spec al vocabulary 
which is peculiar to each. English, in its one dialect, for its 
literature knows but one, is the vernacular, not merely of a 
greater number, but of a greater variety of persons than any 
tongue ever vised by man. It is spoken from the equatOx 
to near the ultimate limit of human habitation in either hem 
isphere, and, starting from the British capital, the geograph- 
ical centre of the solid surface of the globe, it has followed a 
thousand radii to the utmost circumference. Especially is it 
found established upon all great lines of traffic and communi- 
cation, at all great points of agricultural or mechanical pro- 
duction, and wherever human life exists in its most energetic, 
most restless, intensest forms, there it is the organ for the 
expression of all that belongs to man's dearest interests, 
widest sympathies, highest aspirations. It is, moreover, emi- 
nently the language of liberty, for, of those to whom it is 
native, by far the largest portion enjoy a degree of personal, 
social, political, and religious freedom never before possessed 
by humanity, upon a great scale. From all these circum- 
stances, there are to be found among those who habitually use 
the English tongue, and are familiar with written language, 
if not a greater diversity of character, at least greater differ- 
ences of interest and external condition, a more generally 
diffused culture, and a wider range of thought, than have 
ever before been united by one medium of communication.- 
The press furnishes to every English writer the means, and 
suggests to him a motive, for bringing this vast and diversi- 
fied assemblage, the representatives of every human interest, 
the embodiment of all human intelligence, all human pas- 
sion, within the reach of his voice, and in him, who, with 
even moderate abilities, writes from the heart, and to the 
heart, it is no extravagant aspiration to hope, that he shall 



MULTITUDE OF AUTHORS. 439 

be read amid the shivering frosts of the polar circle and the 
sweltering heat of the tropics, in lonely deserts and thick 
peopled cities, upon silent prairies and by the shore of the 
lond-voiced ocean. The wings of British and American com- 
merce scatter the productions of Anglo-Saxon genius over 
the habitable globe. The thunder of the great London jour 
nal reverberates through every clime, and the opinions of the 
ISTew York press are quoted in every commercial port, in 
every political capital. 

Thus, for the living author, English is what Latin and 
Greek are for the dead, a cosmopolite speech, whose range in 
comprehensiveness of space corresponds to the duration of 
the classical tongues in time ; and if the voice of Athens and 
of Rome enjoys the longer echo, the words of the Anglican 
speaker are heard over the wider theatre. 

Every man, therefore, who, in furtherance of the aims of 
generous scholarship, or in advocacy of any right or inter- 
est of humanity, addresses himself to the boundless audi- 
ence reached through the medium of the Anglican press, is 
naturally inclined to use a comprehensive dialect, a wide 
variety of illustration, and clear and unequivocal forms of 
expression. Hence, the art of printing demands from its 
English and American patrons, not a multiplicity of words 
merely, but a style combining simplicity and catholicity of 
structure, conformity to the principles of universal grammar, 
and consequently a freedom from provincialisms and arbitrary 
idioms, intelligibility, in short, to a degree not required in the 
literature of any other age or race. There is another circum- 
stance connected with the operations of the press, of a coun- 
teracting character, so far as purity of expression is con- 
cerned, which much affects the habitual style of composition 
in our language. The general diffusion of intelligence among 



MO POPULAR LITERATURE. 

the English-speaking people has created not only a great 
multitude of readers, but, at the same time that it brings 
with it a wider diffusion of ability to produce, it encourages 
the efforts of a more than proportionate number of literary 
artisans. The rewards of authorship flowing through the 
press are now seductive beyond those won in any other field 
of human effort. A successful English writer enjoys a 
contemporaneous fame coextensive with civilization. His 
renown surpasses that of the soldier whose exploits he 
immortalizes, his influence is greater than that of a premier, 
and he reaps a harvest of solid gains more certain and 
scarcely less abundant than that of the thriftiest merchant. 
The London Times divides among its managers and its con- 
tributors the revenues of a principality, parliamentary ma- 
jorities and ministers shrink before its censures, and the 
potent Governor-General of British India bows to its untitled 
correspondent. Prizes so rich, so tempting, and seemingly 
so easy of attainment, will be eagerly sought by thousands 
of competitors. The harvest of fame and profit, praise and 
power, depends upon the extent of the circle in which it is to 
be reaped, the number, not the character, of the consumers, 
for whose use the commodity is prepared. None seek the 
audience ' fit though few,' that contented the ambition of 
Milton, and all writers for the press now measure their glory 
by their gains. Popular literature in all its forms is conse- 
quently in the ascendant. The novel of society, the maga- 
zine story, the poetic tale, of easy rhyme and easy reading, 
the daily sheet, and especially the illustrated gazette, these 
are the bazaars where genius now offers itself for sale. The 
aim of a numerous class of popular writers is to reproduce, 
in permanent forms, the tone of light and easy conversation, 
to make books and journals speak the dialect of the saloon, 



POPULAR LITERATURE. 441 

and hence pungency of expression, innuendo, verbal wit, 
irony, banter and raillery, trifling with serious interests, are 
the characteristics of what we call popular literature, and 
our language must have a vocabulary which accommodates 
itself to the taste of those whom such qualities of diction 
alone attract. In the periodical and fugitive department, 
scandal and personality are eminently acceptable, and noth- 
ing gives a pamphlet or a newspaper greater currency, than 
the dexterity with which, not fashionable vices, bnt private 
character, is anatomized and held np to scorn or ridicule. 
The point of satire lies in its individuality. Its victims must 
have a local habitation and a name. Sly allusion, semi-equiv- 
ocal expression, and pointed insinuation, too well defined to 
leave its personal application doubtful, therefore, form a 
large part of the diction of journalistic articles relating to 
social life, while in political warfare, the boldest libels, the 
most undisguised grossness of abuse, alone suit the palate of 
heated partisanship. Hence, the dialect of personal vituper- 
ation, the rhetoric of malice in all its modifications, the art 
of damning with faint praise, the sneer of contemptuous irony, 
the billingsgate of vulgar hate, all these have been sedulously 
cultivated, and, combined with a certain flippancy of expres- 
sion and ready command of a tolerably extensive vocabulary, 
they are enough to make the fortune of any sharp, shallow, 
unprincipled journalist, who is content with the fame and 
the pelf, which the unscrupulous use of such accomplish- 
ments can hardly fail to secure. 

The periodical press is unquestionably the channel, 
through which the art of printing puts forth its most powerful 
influence on language, and it seenus remarkable, that period- 
icals, which have existed in England since the reign of James 
I., should scarcely have produced an appreciable effect upon 



442 PERIODICALS. 

the English tongue, until they had been a hundred years in 
operation. The establishment of daily newspapers and of* 
literary journals was nearly contemporaneous, and dates 
from an early period in the eighteenth century, but though 
the Tattler, the Spectator and the Guardian had a compara 
tively large circulation, and exerted a great influence upon 
the dialect of their time, yet the newspaper can scarcely be 
said to have had a place in literature until the success of the 
letters of Junius, which appeared in the Morning Advertiser 
from 1769 to 1772, gave to that class of periodicals an ascen- 
dency which it has ever since maintained. It may now 
fairly be said, that there is no agency through which man 
acts more powerfully upon the mind of his fellow-man, and 
the influence of the art of printing upon language and 
thought has reached its acme in the daily newspaper. 

The influence of the periodical press upon the purity of 
language must be admitted to have proved hitherto, upon 
the whole, a deleterious one, and countries, where, as in Eng- 
land and America, the press is free, and periodicals conse- 
quently numerous, are particularly exposed to this source of 
corruption. The newspaper press has indeed rendered some 
service to language, by giving to it a greater flexibility of 
structure, from the necessity of finding popular and intelligi- 
ble forms of expression for every class of subjects, and it has 
now and then preserved, for the permanent vocabulary of 
our speech, a happy and forcible popular word or phrase, 
which would otherwise have been forgotten with the occasion 
that gave it birth. But these advantages are a very inade- 
quate compensation for the mischiefs resulting from the slov- 
enliness and inaccuracy inseparable from the necessity oi 
hasty composition upon a great variety of subjects, th em- 
eel ves often very imperfectly understood by the writer. 



NEWSPAPERS. 



US 



Editors naturally seek to accommodate their style to the 
capacity and taste of the largest circle of 1 laders, and in theii 
estimate of their public, they are very apt to aim below the 
mark, and thus gradually to deprave, rather than elevate and 
refine the taste of those whom they address. Hence arise the 
inflated diction, the straining after effect, the use of cant 
phrases, and of such expressions as not only fall in with, but 
tend to aggravate the prevalent evil humors and proclivities 
of the time, the. hyperbolical tone in which they commend 
their patrons or the candidates of their party, and, in short, 
all the vices of exaggeration of style and language. There 
is, however, of late years, a great improvement in the lit- 
erary character of the English and American newspaper. 
The London Times, whatever may be thought of its moral or 
political tendencies, has long employed writers of surpassing 
ability, and its example has done much to elevate the tone 
of editorial journalship in both the countries which employ 
its language. The pet phrases of hack journalists, the 
euphemism that but lately characterized the American news- 
papers, are fast giving place to less affected and more appro- 
priate forms of expression. It is only the lowest class of 
dailies that still regard ' woman ' as not an honorable or 
respectful designation of the sex, and it is in their columns 
alone, that, in place of ' well-dressed or handsome women,' 
we read of ' elegantly attired females,' and of ' beautiful 
ladies.' The Anglican newspaper is now — what the French 
journal long has been — an intellectual organ, an authority 
for cultivated circles in politics, in letters, in aesthetics. Be- 
sides this, it is the popular guide and instructor for evil and 
for good, and it may truly be said to be the feature most 
characteristic of the life and literature of Anglo-Saxon hu- 
manity in the present age. 



LECTURE XXI. 

FEE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS AFFECTED BY THE ART OF PRINTING 

III. 

On a former occasion, I spoke of the diffusion of classical 
literature in modern Europe — the first great result of the in- 
vention of printing — as having much enlarged the English 
and other European vocabularies, by the introduction of new 
words derived from Greek and Latin roots. But the revival 
of learning was not unaccompanied with effects prejudicial to 
the cultivation of the modern languages, and their employ- 
ment for the higher purposes of literature. At that period, 
most of them were poor in vocabulary, rude and equivocal in 
syntax, unsettled in orthography, distracted with variety of 
dialect, and unmelodious in articulation. Under such cir- 
cumstances, nothing could be more natural than that scholars 
imbued with the elegance, the power, the majesty of the 
ancient tongues and of the immortal works which adorned 
them, should have preferred to employ, as a vehicle for their 
own thoughts, a language which the church had everywhere 
diffused, and which was already fitted to express the highest 
conceptions of the human intellect, the most splendid images of 
the human fancy. He who wrote in Latin had the civilized 



USE OF LATIN. 445 

world for his public ; he who used a modern tongue could 
only count as readers the people of his province, or at most 
of a comparatively narrow sovereignty. Until, therefore, by 
a slow and gradual process, the necessity of sympathy and 
intellectual communication between the learned and the ig- 
norant, had enriched the vernacular tongues with numerous 
words from the dialects of theology, and ethics, and law, and 
literature, but few scholars ventured to employ so humble 
a medium. To write in the vulgar speech was a humilia- 
tion, a degradation of the thought and its author, and literary 
works in the modern tongues were generally prefaced with 
an apology for appearing in so mean a dress. 

The close analogy between the Latin and its Romance 
descendants much facilitated the enrichment of the dialects 
of Southern Europe, but in England and the Continental 
Gothic nations, the stimulus of the Reformation was neces- 
sary to furnish an adequate motive and a sufficient impulse 
for a corresponding improvement in the respective languages 
of those peoples. 

Even so late as 1544, after so many great names had en 
nobled the speech of England, Ascham, writing on the fa- 
miliar and popular subject of Archery, says, that it " would 
have been both more profitable for his study, and also more 
honest for his name, to have written in another tongue." 

" As for the Latine or Greeke tongue," continues he, 
" everye thinge is so excellentlye done in them, that none 
can do better. In the Englishe tongue, contrary, everye 
thinge in a maner so meanlye both for the matter and hande- 
linge, that no man can do worse. For therein the least 
learned, for the most part, have bene alwayes most readye 
to write. And they which had least hope in Latine, have 



4:4:6 DIFFUSION OF BOOKS. 

been most bould in Englishe; when surely e every e man that 
is most ready e to talke, is not most able to write." * 

One of the most obvious modes in which the art of print- 
ing has affected language, is, that by the cheapness and con- 
sequent multiplication of books, and by the greater uniformi- 
ty and legibility of its characters, it has made reading much 
easier of acquisition, and thus allowed to a larger proportion 
of those who use a given language access to its highest stand- 
ards of propriety and elegance. Of course, the effects of 
thus bringing books within the reach of a larger class will be 
measured, as between different countries, by the comparative 
extent to which literature is really diffused in them, and 
where the press is most active and least restricted, there the 
greatest number of the people will learn to comprehend and 
use the language of books, and there the average standard of 
correctness of speech will be relatively highest. 

The same circumstances, independently of the superior in- 
ducements to authorship of which I have already spoken, will 
tend to increase the number of aspirants for literary fame, 
for where all read, many will feel and obey the impulse to 
write. The abundant rivalries thus created in every field of 
intellectual effort are doubtless a great incentive to the attain- 
ment of superior excellence in composition, but, on the other 
hand, the fear of anticipation, and the haste to reap the solid 
rewards of successful authorship, concur to promote a rapidity 
of production, which is inevitably associated with some negli- 
gence in point of form. I cannot but think that a perhaps 
unconscious sense (if that phrase does not involve a contra- 
diction) of the necessity of rapid production, had some in- 
: n prompting the advice given to ; 

* Preface to Toxophilus. 



RAPID COMPOSITION. 447 

authors so unlike as Oobbett and Niebuhr. " Never think 
of mending what you write ; let it go ; no patching ; " saya 
Cobbett, in his strong English. " Endeavor," says Niebuhr, 
" never to strike out any thing of what you have once written 
down. Punish yourself by allowing once or twice some 
thing to pass, though you see you might give it better." 
And even Gibbon habitually conformed to the same rule, 
however little trace of it his highly artificial style betrays.* 
That this method has its advantages as a means of enforcing 
caution in the use of words is doubtless true, and perhaps he, 
who, like most modern writers, aims only to influence the 
opinion of the hour, may advantageously use the popular 
dialect, which will usually most readily suggest itself to him 
who writes for popular effect. But, nevertheless, whatever 
may be the innuence of the practice on the writer himself, 
however it may affect his position with his contemporaries, it 
cannot but have a prejudicial result as respects the idiom of 
the language, and the permanence of the works which are 
composed in it. Upon these points, the experience and judg- 
ment of all literature are to the contrary of the rule. The 
revamping of our own writings, indeed, after an interval so 
long that the mental status in which we composed them is 
forgotten, and cannot be conjured up and revivified, is a 
dangerous experiment, but literary biography furnishes the 
most abundant proofs, that, in all ages, the works which 
stand as types of language and composition, have been of 
glow and laborious production, and have undergone the most 



* It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, 
to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of 
the pen till I had given the last polish to my work. — Gibbon, Memoirs, Chap. ix. 

And in chapter x., speaking of his history, he says, "My first rough maim 
script, without any intermediate copy, has been sent to the press." 



4:4:8 BAPID COMPOSITION. 

careful and repeated revision and emendation.* Especially 
is this trne with regard to the oratorical dialect. Great 
practice, strong passion, and a fervid imagination may con- 
fer the gift of unstudied eloquence, but the orations which 
after-ages read with applause are almost never the result of 
unpremeditated effort. Celebrated speakers prepare their 
impromptus beforehand, to an extent incredible to those who 
are not familiar with their habits, or, at the least, they make 
them, by subsequent revision, very different in diction from 
the volley of winged words which the excitement of debate 
may have shot forth. Demosthenes, the greatest master of 
eloquence whose works remain in a written form, never 
ventured to address an audience without laborious prepara- 
tion, and we know from the younger Pliny, that the Roman 
advocates of his time carefully studied their speeches before 
delivery, and scrupulously corrected and amplified them, in 
writing them out afterwards. 

In recent times, the press has become what the Senate 
and the Forum were in the old republics, but the rapid move- 
ment of modern society is unfavorable to the leisurely execu- 
tion, the finish and completeness of literary works, and, of 

* Not to speak of the endless limce labor of ancient classic literature, per- 
fection of manner has been attained by modern writers only by similar methods. 
The stylistic ability of an author must always be estimated with reference to the 
innate power of expression possessed by the language he uses. Thus tried, 
Pascal and Paul Louis Courier are by far the greatest stylists of modern times, 
and we have no English writer who can compare with either, in perfect adapta- 
tion of the expression to the thought, or in flowing ease and gracefulness of 
diction. This excellence in both cases was the fruit of the most ceaseless an/ 
persevering labor in revision and correction. Marvellous as is the perfection of 
Goethe's style, he does not always impress you with the conviction that he has 
exhausted the utmost resources of his native tongue, and it is remarkable that 
one of his most felicitously expressed productions is a translation from the 
French — the Rameau's Nephew of Diderot — in which the fluent beauty of the 
original is admirably rendered, with little sacrifice of the German idiom. 



COMMUNITY :F THOUGHT. tJ49 

course, to polish and accuracy of language. He who writes 
for a fickle, a restless, or a progressive public, must take the 
tide at its flow, and if he follows the Horatian precept, and 
spends nine years in the elaboration and recension of his 
book, or in pausing to allow himself time for cool criticism, 
he will find that he comes too late. The world, in its swift 
advancement, has already passed far beyond him. 

The universality of literature, its general popularization 
by the press, has not only given birth to a more numerous 
class of producers, but has made it much more truly an ex- 
pression or exponent of the mind and tendencies of the time 
and people, than in the ages which preceded the invention of 
printing. In every country of the civilized world, there is a 
manifest drift in some particular direction, and literary effort 
of all sorts feels the impulse of the current. The perpetual, 
all-embracing inter-cornmunication between mind and mind, 
through the press, stamps upon all the same tendencies, the 
same course of thought, the same proximate conclusions. 
Society is more intensely social. Men are become more 
deeply imbued with the spirit of a common humanity, and 
know and participate in each other's intellectual condition. 
There is a remarkable proof of this in the perpetually repeat- 
ed instances of concurrent mental action between unconnected 
individuals. Not only does almost every new mechanical 
contrivance originate with half a dozen different inventors 
at the same moment, but the same thing is true of literary 
creation. If you conceive a striking thought, a beautiful 
image, an apposite illustration, which you know to be original 
with yourself, and delay for a twelvemonth to vindicate youi 
priority of claim by putting it on record, you will find a 
dozen scattered authors simultaneously uttering the same 

thing. There are in the human mind unfathomable depths, 
29 



4:50 LAW OF COPYRIGHT. 

out of which gush, unbidden, the well-springs of poesy and 
of thought ; there are mines unilluminated even by the lamp 
of consciousness, where the intellect toils in silent, sleepless 
seclusion, and sends up, by invisible machinery, the ore 
of hidden veins, to be smelted and refined in the light of 
open day. The press, which has done so much to reveal 
man to man, and thereby to promote the reciprocal action of 
each upon his fellow, has established new sympathies be- 
tween even these mysterious abysses of our wonderful and 
fearful being, and thus contributed to bring about a oneness 
of character, which unmistakably manifests itself in oneness 
of thought and oneness of speech. 

The law of copyright, though we have evidence in Mar- 
tial and other writers, that ancient authors were sometimes 
paid by booksellers for their works, is a result of the art of 
printing, and could be of little value without it. It has ren- 
dered no other service to literature than the very doubtful 
one of furnishing a pecuniary inducement to literary effort. 
The privilege of copyright was not originally granted as a 
reward and stimulus to authorship, but as a protection to the 
printer against a dangerous competition, for it extended as 
well to editions of the classics as to contemporaneous pro- 
ductions, and of course the benefit to authors was but inciden- 
tal. In fact, it is but lately that it could have operated at all 
as a reward to English writers, for until the last century, the 
price of the copyright of original English works was in general 
hardly as much as the cost of the paper on which they were 
written. The continental booksellers seem to have paid more 
liberally a century previous.* At this day, it may be doubt- 



* He took nothing of Printers for his copies, as he writeth, saying: "I 
have no plenty of money, and thus yet I dcale with the Printers; I receiv* 



COPYRIGHT. 451 

ed whether a single work of permanent value, in the literature 
of any living language, owes its existence to the protection 
afforded by law. Books, which are composed only because 
they will sell, are swiftly written, swiftly read, and, as they 
deserve, swiftly forgotten, while those which are destined to 
produce a deep and lasting impression, scarcely win their way 
to popular favor and an authoritative position, until the 
privilege of copyright has expired by legal limitation. 
There are abuses connected with this privilege, which are high- 
ly detrimental to the interests of literature. The exclusive 
right of printing a particular book is, in the hands of wealthy 
publishers, a means of preventing the publication of other and 
perhaps better books on the same subject, and thus that 
which ought to be an encouragement to effort, is made to 
operate so as to discountenance the attempts of rivals in the 
same field. The proprietor of a book, which, from its nature, 
as a dictionary or a school-book, is largely in demand, will 
supply booksellers with his wares only upon condition that 
they will sell no rival work. A combination between three 
or four large publishing houses, each having its own copy- 
rights, may thus exclude from sale one set of books, and force 
another upon the market with very little regard to the opinion 
of competent judges as to the merits of either. Besides this, 
most of the Reviews, and to some extent the newspapers, are 
controlled by book-publishers, and thus criticism is forestall- 
ed, and an artificial public opinion created, which not only 
gives currency to inferior productions, and bestows upon 
their authors the rewards which excellence alone ouo-ht to 



nothing from them for recompense of my many copies. Sometimes I receive ol 
them one copy. This I thinke is due to me, whereas other writers, yea transla« 
tors, for every eight leaves, have an angel."— Life of Luther, Abel Rediviv. p. 
48. 



£52 PRIDE OF IGNORANCE. 

secure, but vitiates the taste of the age, and lowers the standi 
ard of composition, by holding up as models for imitation, 
writings which deserve only to be pointed at as examples to 
be shunned. 

Sou they, in his Colloquies, makes the remarkable state 
rnent, that " one of the first effects of printing was to make 
proud men look upon learning as disgraced, by being thus 
brought within reach of the common people." " When lay- 
men in humble life," continues he, " were enabled to procure 
books, the pride of aristocracy took an absurd course, inso- 
much that at one time it was deemed derogatory to a noble- 
man if he could read or write. Even scholars themselves 
complained that the reputation of learning, and the respect 
due to it, and its rewards, were lowered when it was thrown 
open to all men. Even in this island, ignorance was for 
some generations considered to be a mark of distinction, by 
which a man of gentle birth chose, not unfrequently, to 
make it apparent that he was no more obliged to live by the 
toil of his brain, than by the sweat of his brow." 

The feeling which Southey ascribes to the " pride of the 
aristocracy," was really an effect of ecclesiastical jealousy. 
There is little evidence to show that the aristocracy were 
more deplorably ignorant after the introduction of printing 
than before, but there is abundant proof that the new art 
was regarded with dislike by the church, when employed for 
any purpose but the multiplication and cheapening of the 
Latin books required for the use of the clergy themselves. 
To the same cause we are to ascribe the fact, often noticed as 
a singular one, that Caxton printed very few religious books. 
Sir Thomas More expressly declares, that Caxton refrained 
from printing the Bible in English, because he feared that 
the penalties, ordained by Archbishop Arundel for copying 



IGNORANCE OF CLERGY. 453 

or using Wycliffe's Bible, would be corruptly and illegally 
enforced against any English translation of the sacred 
volume. For such religious books in Latin as would have 
been allowed to be printed, there was fortunately little de- 
mand in England, and to the great benefit of the English 
language and literature, Caxton was not only left free, but 
obliged, to confine the operations of his press almost wholly to 
the publishing of English books. The English priests, them- 
selves, were at that period as ignorant as are those of the 
Oriental churches at the present moment. We learn from 
Fuller, that early in Queen Elizabeth's reign the clergy were 
ordered to con over the lessons by themselves once or twice 
before every service, in order that they might be able to read 
them fluently to the congregation. 

The art of printing, and especially the periodical press, 
has been a most influential agency in extirpating local pe- 
culiarities of dialect, and producing the general uniformity 
with which the English language is spoken and written wher- 
ever it is used at all. Persons who study our American 
speech cannot fail to notice, that there is among us a tenden- 
cy to pronounce words, and especially proper names, more in 
accordance with their orthography, and to make fewer excep 
tions to general rules, than in England. The most obvious, 
though not the only cause of this, is the universality of the 
ability to read and write, which modern society in free coun- 
tries owes to the art of printing. Where all read, most per- 
sons first become acquainted with the names of distant lo- 
calities, of eminent persons, and of new objects, through the 
press, and not by the ear. Names so learned will of course 
be pronounced according to the regular orthoepy of the lan- 
guage, and thus a general pronunciation, often very discord- 
ant from the local one, becomes established. In the case of 



£54 PRONUNCIATION. 

foreign words, proper or common, we are prepared to find, 
among persons acquainted only with English, as the mass of 
those to whom that language is vernacular necessarily must 
be, a pronunciation of such names widely different from the 
native articulation. However repulsive, therefore, such dis- 
tortions of names may be to those familiar with them in their 
original orthoepy, we are not surprised to hear the name 
of the great bankers of Europe popularly pronounced Both- 
child, or American artists, of foreign extraction, spoken of 
respectively, as Both-ermel, and Gotts-chalk. Indeed, a strict 
conformity to the native pronunciation of names, belonging 
to languages whose orthographical system differs much from 
our own, is generally considered an offensive affectation, and 
a great British orator, who was as familiar with French as 
with English, is said to have been so scrupulous on this point, 
that, in his parliamentary speeches, he habitually spoke of an 
important French port as the city of Bordeaux. In England, 
the names of families and of towns are often very strangely 
corrupted, not in vulgar pronunciation alone, but by the 
general usage of the highest classes. Thus the originally 
French name, now naturalized in England and America, 
which is spelt (and with us pronounced) Beauchamp, is in 
England called Beecham • Belvoir is Beever / Saint John, 
Sinjon / Cholmondeley, Chumley • Cirencester, Siseter, and 
Alexander Gil tells us that in his time Daub ridge-court was 
pronounced Dabscot. Some of these corruptions, at least, 
are old ones, for Froissart, who, as a foreigner, spelt English 
names by the ear, writing about the year 1400, uses Sussetour 
for Cirencester, and Beachame for Beauchamp. Even as 
late as 1651, I find Montgomery spelt in Abel Eedivivus 
Mungumry. The original orthography of all these names is 
now recovered, and strangers, finding them in books of travel 



PRONUNCIATION. 455 

and newspapers, will of course pronounce them as they are 
spelled. So strong, indeed, is the tendency in this conn try 
to conform orthography and speech, that in some instances 
the spelling of English names has been altered to suit the 
family and neighborhood pronunciation. An example of 
this is found in a name which is written and pronounced 
differently, Kirkland, Cartland, and Catlin, by different 
branches of the family and in different localities, though Kirk- 
land is doubtless the original form of all of them. So the 
name Worcester has in some of the families that bear it been 
conformed to a loose pronunciation, and is spelt Wooster. 
These changes in spelling American family names, were made 
at an early day, when, though the ability to read was as 
general as now, yet books and newspapers, and of course the 
opportunities for reading, were much fewer. At present, 
the tendency is in the opposite direction, and many corrupt- 
ed names have been restored both to the original spelling and 
orthoepy. In England, changes of either sort are made 
with somewhat greater difficulty, but there too, since the 
multiplication of railroads, and since names, formerly less 
frequently seen in a written form, are constantly recurring in 
newspapers, railroad tables and the like, and of course oftener 
used by strangers to the local orthoepy, and by them pro- 
nounced as written, there is observed an evident tendency, 
even in the natives of towns hitherto so oddly miscalled, to 
accommodate the spoken form to the orthography, and re- 
store the names to their ancient fulness of articulation. 
Thus, in the case of names widely disseminated by printing 
the distant popular majority, who know the word only hj 
its spelling, are carrying the day over the neighboring few 
who have learned it by the ear, and the letter is likely at 
last to triumph, and bring back the tongue to the primitive 



£56 PRONUNCIATION. 

or an approximate pronunciation. A reform of this natures, 
supported as it is by the constantly increasing influence of 
the press, cannot stop with mere names, and a few years will 
probably free spoken English from some of that clipping, 
crowding, and confusion of syllables, which three centuries 
age led Charles Y. to compare it to the whistling of birds, and 
which, in its modern exaggerated form, is a still more dis- 
agreeable peculiarity of its pronunciation. 

The same causes have produced similar effects in other 
countries, and persons familiar with Continental phonology 
cannot but observe a growing inclination to give a fuller ut- 
terance to obscure sounds, and to articulate letters hitherto 
unpronounced, or, if sounds have been irrecoverably lost, to 
omit the letters which once expressed them. This is most 
readily noticeable in French, because the number of silent 
letters is greater in that than in any other European language, 
and a comparison of recent and older works on French pro- 
nunciation will show that final and radical consonants are 
now, according to the best usage, articulated in many cases 
where they were formerly silent. Palsgrave, whose French 
Grammar was printed in 1530, speaking of French pronun- 
ciation, says, " What consonantes soever they write in any 
worde for the kepynge of trewe orthographie, yet so moche 
covyt they in redyng or spekyng to have all theyr vowelles 
and dipthongues clerly herde, that betwene two vowelles, 
whether they chaunce in one worde alone, or as one worde 
fortuneth to folowe after another, they never sounde but one 
consonant at ones, in so moche that, if two different conso- 
nantes, that is to say, not beyng both of one sorte, come to- 
gether betweene two vowelles, they leve the fyrst of them 
unsounded." He then gives a list of one hundred and nine 
words, where s preceding another consonant is pronounced, 



PRONUNCIATION. 



457 



as exceptions to the general rule. It appears from Beza, that 
there were some other exceptions, but he also recognizes tho 
rule. Printing, and the consequent diffusion of a grammati- 
cal knowledge of the language, have had the effect, first, of 
expelling from the orthography a portion of these silent con- 
sonants, and secondly, of changing the pronunciation and 
bringing it more into accordance with the spelling, by intro- 
ducing the articulation of consonants formerly ' unsounded.' 
This double process is still going on, and we may venture to 
predict, that the spelling and the orthoepy of French will 
be much less irreconcilable a century hence than they are at 
present.* 

* Palsgrave gives the figured pronunciation of a few sentences and single 
words by way of illustrating his rules. In these examples the following worda 
occur : 

dicton, figured pronunciation, diton. 

ajuger. 
moutitude. 
sustance. 
scouture 
morte. 
detiner 
leke. 
elesion. 
celete. 

Palsgrave, 23, 60, 62. 
Genin, a very high authority in French philology, observes : 
" Aujourd'hui il n'est pas un petit commis de magasin qui ne se pique de 
faire sonner les liaisons quand il raisonne sur Par t-antique, ou se plaint d'avoir 
froi t-aux pieds, ou s'accuse avec fatuite de ses tor z-enver z-elle." 

The tendency to pronounce the final consonants (which is but a single case 
of the rehabilitation of disfranchised letters in French phonology) is ascribed by 
Genin to the influence of the theatre, where the articulation of consonants in 
liaisons, partly for metrical reasons and partly for the sake of distinctness, haa 
always been practised in versified dramas. 

Ge'nin Rec. Phil. II. 425, 427. 
Doubtless in Paris, and in France at large, the influence of the theatre on 
Buch questions is very great ; but, as the corresponding change in English 
articulation is clearly traceable, not to theatrical practice, but to the diffusion of 
letters, I cannot but suppose that like effects in Fiance may be, in great part at 
least, ascribed to the same cause. 



adjuger, 


ti 


multitude, 


" 


substance, 


u 


scou^pture 


(sculpture) 


mortet, 
destiner, 


u 


leque?, 


u 


election, 


u 


celeste, 


« 



158 !»EKMANElSrCE OF »VORDS. 

I have shown in a former lecture that the mechanical 
difficulties of the art of printing at first tended to increase 
the existing confusion and uncertainty of English orthogra- 
phy, hut after these difficulties were overcome, as they seem 
to have been soon after the publication of the first editions 
of King James's Bible, the influence of printing was in the 
contrary direction, and our spelling has within two hundred 
years undergone far fewer and less important changes than 
our vocabulary. In both these particulars, the art is now 
eminently conservative ; in the former, merely sustaining that 
which has once become established, but in the latter both 
preserving the old and freely admitting the new. "With so 
large a number of public libraries usually well secured against 
destruction by negligence or violence, scarcely any book can 
become absolutely extinct ; and every word, once introduced 
into our printed literature, may fairly be said to have become 
imperishable. We find in old authors many words now dis- 
used, and others which are wholly unintelligible. These, in 
6ome instances, turn out to be typographical errors, but the 
industry of etymologists is continually discovering the mean- 
ing cf old words not hitherto understood, and reviving obso- 
lete or obsolescent expressions, which the revolutions of time 
and circumstance have again made needful or convenient 
Thus the boast of printing, that it is the art which is the 
general conservator of all arts, proves eminently true with 
respect to speech, which may be considered as an art, in so 
far as it is an acquired, not a purely spontaneous, self-devel- 
oping faculty. 

Printing has conferred an important benefit on language, 
by multiplying and putting within the reach of every man 
books of a class which, when literature existed only in a 
written form, were rarer than those of almost any other 



DICTIONARIES. 4.59 

character. 1 refer to dictionaries, and other works of the 
comprehensive and encyclopedic class, which, although they 
cannot be said to owe their existence to printing, yet could 
never have obtained a general circulation without it. We 
know that ancient literature possessed works of this kind, but 
they were so little multiplied, that scarcely any of them have 
come down to us ; nor did lexicography make a progress cor- 
respondent with that of other departments of knowledge, 
until after the art of printing had been long employed in the 
diffusion of general literature. 

The multiplication and improvement of dictionaries is a 
matter especially important to the general comprehension of 
English, both because of its great copiousness, and more 
particularly on account of the multifarious character of its 
sources, and its little facility of derivation and composition. 
Languages which, like Greek and German, are derived by 
simple and easily understood rules from a comparatively 
small number of roots, contain few words not intelligible to 
those acquainted with their familiar and constantly recurring 
rudiments. For instance, the common German-English dic- 
tionaries contain about two hundred words compounded of 
halb, the equivalent of our English half, and some other 
equally familiar root, the meaning of every one of which 
compounds is immediately obvious to every German. In 
Webster, I find fewer than fifty compounds into which our 
half enters, its place being taken in other words by the 
Greek hemi, the Latin, semi, the French demi, and the 
Italian mezzo, all of which are unmeaning to the English- 
man, and their explanations must be sought in dictionaries. 
Although, therefore, from the former low state of philologi- 
cal learning in England and America, our lexicography is far 
behind that of most Continental nations, yet no modern Ian- 



460 INDEXES. 

guage so essentially requires the aid < ' dictionaries as the 
English. 

Printing has also introduced a multitude of other facili- 
ties for the convenient use of books, such, for example, as 
indexes. Two copies of the same manuscript, especially if 
written by different persons, would never correspond, line for 
line, or even page for page, and, of course, an index prepared 
for one copy would not answer as a guide to a given passage 
in another. To prepare a separate index for each manuscript 
would be a work of hardly less labor and cost than to rewrite 
the whole copy, and the consequence was that indexes scarcely 
existed at all, and learned men were obliged to rely upon 
their memories alone, when they wished to refer to a particu- 
lar passage in the works of an author.* Accordingly, the 
ancients introduced quotations, with no other indication of 



* Pliny's Natural History is one of the few ancient books which have come 
down to us with even a Table of Contents. The author concludes his Dedication 
to Vespasian with this reference to his Table, as translated by Holland, London, 
1601 : " Now to conclude and knit up mine epistle : knowing as I doe, that for 
the good of the commonweale, you should be spared and not empeached by any 
privat businesse of your owne, and namely in perusing these long volumes of 
mine ; to prevent this trouble, therefore, I have adioyned immediately to this 
epistle and prefixed before these books, the summarie or contents of everie 
one : and verie carefully have I endeavoured that you should not need to read 
them throughout, whereby all others also, after your example, may ease them, 
selves of the like labour ; and as any man is desirous to know this or that, he 
may seeke and readily find in what place to meet with the same. This learned 
I of Valerius Sorranus, one of our owne Latin writers, who hath done the like 
before me and set an Index to those Books which he entituled iiroirTidia>v." 

The Table begins with a statement of the general subject of each book ; and 
as a ready method of finding the books, the initial words of each are given, 
nothing being referred to by number of page. Then follows a specific list of the 
Bubjects discussed in the several books, an estimate of the number of particular 
facts recorded, and the names of the authors cited as authorities. 

Of course, verbal indexes and concordances, which modern critical scholars 
find so useful, must have been much rarer than Tables of Contents, and even 
these, it is evident from the remarks of Pliny, were little known in his time. 



LEGIBILITY OF PRINT. 461 

their source than the name of the anthor, or at most the ': ook, 
from which they were taken. But the very want of these 
facilities had its advantages, for writers would be more likely 
to accustom themselves to a natural and logical arrangement 
of the divisions and subdivisions of their subject, when they 
knew that a reader could have no mere mechanical means of 
obtaining a general view of it. Books were anciently written 
to be read, studied, to be, as Thucydides has it, " a possession 
forever," not to amuse an idle hour, or at best to be consulted 
upon special occasion, as one looks out a word in a dictionary. 
There are other facilities of research and of criticism con- 
nected with the legibility of letter-press, which are of no 
trifling advantage to the scholar. Suppose he wishes to find 
in a particular author, a passage to which he has not an exact 
reference, or that he is seeking exemplifications of the use of 
a given word or phrase, in order to determine its meaning or 
syntactical character, by the authority of good writers ; the 
eye, which takes in a page at a glance, will run through a 
printed volume, and discover the passage or the word sought 
for, in the time which would be required to decipher half a 
dozen columns of manuscript. Again, let an author who has 
carefully elaborated his composition, and given it the finish- 
ing touches, revise it in letter-press, and how will the errors, 
the repetitions, the negligences, which a dozen perusals in 
manuscript had failed to detect, stare him in the face, as 
monstrous and palpable delinquencies ! So, the compression 
of matter, which printing allows, is a thing of very great 
convenience. True it is, that in the days of ancient calli- 
graphy, minute writing was brought to such perfection that, 
as is easily shown by calculation, Cicero's story of the Iliad, 
which could be carried in a nutshell, ia not in the slightest 



162 COMPRESSION OF PRINT. 

degree improbable ; and I have myself seen the entire Arabic 
Koran in a parchment roll four inches wide and half an inch 
in diameter.* But these are exceptional cases. Printed let- 
ter is, generally, much smaller than manuscript, and as man- 
uscripts in the volume, or roll-form, were usually written oa 
one side only, the bulk of a printed book is very much lesa 
than that of the same matter written by the hand. Hence we 
have, within the compass of a hand-volume, a dictionary or 

* Cicero hath recorded, that the whole Poeme of Homer called IHas, was 
written in a peace of parchmin, which was able to be couched within a nut-shell. 

Holland's Pliny, i. 167. 

Lalanne, Curiosites Bibliographiques, describes an edition of Rochefoucault's 
Maxims, published by Didot in 1829, as printed typographically in pages meas- 
uring 951 square millimetres, and containing 26 lines, with 44 letters to the line. 
A page one inch and twenty-one hundredths square, would be about equal to 
951 square millimetres, or one square inch and forty-six hundredths, which 
would give 783 letters to the inch. This falls far short of what has been 
accomplished by the pen, and very greatly below the performances of the graver. 
Mr. Charles Toppan, an eminent engraver of New York, has engraved the 
Lord's Praj-er with its title, and the Ten Commandments with title and numbers, 
and his own initials, within a circle of less than 41-hundredths of an inch in 
diameter. The number of letters and figures on this plate is 1550, and as its 
area is a trifle over an eighth of a square inch, the number of letters to the 
square inch would be 12,000. According to Lalanne, the Iliad contains 501,930 
letters, and of course, if engraved with equal minuteness, the whole Iliad would 
be contained within the compass of less than forty-two square inches, or, in 
other words, on a slip of paper one inch wide and twenty-one inches long, 
printed on both sides. 

The title of Mr. Toppan's engraving can he made out, and, in a very strong 
light, much more of it read, without a magnifier, at least by the microscopic 
vision of a near-sighted person, but the height of the letters does not exceed the 
150th part of an inch, and it cannot be said to be legible to the naked eye. 
Lalanne says, that Huet proved by experiment, that a thin parchment, measuring 
27 by 21£ centimetres, which would give an area of 89 square inches, written 
on both sides, would contain the Iliad, and such a parchment, he observes, 
would readily go into a common-sized nut. Mr. Toppan might double the height 
and width of his letters and spaces, and still print the whole Iliad on one side of 
such a leaf. 

Among the impudent forgeries of the notorious Simonides, there were manu- 
Bcripts of wonderful beauty of execution, and written in characters almost as 
minute as those of Mr. Toppan's engraving. 



MULTIPLICATION OF BOOKS. 463 

other book of reference, which, in an ancient iibraiy, would 
have filled a compartment ; and the convenience of consult- 
ing it is increased in much the same proportion as its com- 
pression. 

On the other hand, the facilities of production have mul- 
tiplied the mass of books out of all proportion to the needs 
of literature. The cost of a book lies mainly in what printers 
call composition, that is, the arrangement of the type and 
pages to receive the impression. The amount of this item is 
the same for one copy as for a hundred thousand, and the 
typographical composition of a volume is scarcely more ex- 
pensive than the execution of a single copy carefully written 
by hand. Every successive repetition of a manuscript costs 
as much as the first, and each, of course, as much as the 
type-setting for a whole edition of a printed book. Hence, 
an ancient author, who desired a wide and permanent circu- 
lation for his book, would study to confine it within such 
limits of bulk and price, that it could be repeated and mul- 
tiplied without an extravagant tax on the purses of his public. 
But when the cost of books was so reduced by printing that 
the price of one ancient volume would buy a library, and a 
publisher could circulate a hundred copies for a less sum 
than was formerly expended in producing one, the necessity 
of conciseness and compression was no longer felt. While, 
therefore, the immortal history of Thucydides, which, after 
three and twenty centuries, numbers hardly fewer readers 
than in the days of its greatest domestic glory, is contained 
in two pocket volumes, Thuanus in the sixteenth century ex- 
tends his narrative of the events of a few years, on a narrow 
theatre, to seven folios, the weight of which has already 
smothered the fame of their author. So numerous have 



4:64: EXTENT OF LIBRARIES. 

books become, by modern facilities of production and re- 
production, that men of varied tastes and multifarious read- 
ing can find time to peruse nothing. They skim over books, 
or as the French expressively say, they parcourent les 
livres, run through them, study them by tables of contents 
and indexes. " What, read books ! " said one of the great 
lights of European physiological science to a not less eminent 
American scholar, " I never read a book in my life, except 
the Bible." He had time only to glance over the thousands 
of volumes which lay around him, to consult them occasion- 
ally, to excerpt the particular facts or illustrations which he 
needed to aid him in his own researches. 

The elder Pliny, the most indefatigable laborer, the most 
voracious literary glutton of ancient times, in that remarka- 
ble dedication of his Natural History which I have just cited, 
says, that he had collected his encyclopedia out of two thou- 
sand volumes, written by one hundred approved authors, all 
of which he had diligently read.* Now, to judge from the 
Herculanensian manuscripts, these two thousand rolls would 
hardly have made two hundred fair octavos, and this was 
probably the entire library of the most learned of the Ro- 
mans. In modern times, scholars by no means millionaires, 
as Thott in Denmark and Murr in Germany, have collected 
libraries of more than one hundred thousand volumes, each 
of which was equivalent to many of Pliny's, though we may 



* In 36 Books I have comprised 20,000 things, all worthie of regard and 
consideration, which I have collected out of 2000 volumes or thereabout, that I 
have diligently read, (and yet verie few of them there be, that men learned 
otherwise, and studious, dare meddle withall, for the deepe matter and hidden 
secrets therein contained,) and those written by 100 several elect and approved 
authors. 

Holland's Pliny. Dedication. 



STEREOTYPE. 465 

well doubt whether the relative value was proportioned to 
the bulk.* 

The art of stereotyping has greatly increased the ease of 
multiplication, and, in books much in demand, lessened the 
cost of production, and of course augmented the pecuniary 
j>rofits of the publisher and the author, though without a cor- 
responding reduction of price to the consumer, and with some 
detriment to the interests of literature. True it is, that a 
writer who designs to stereotype his work, has strong induce- 
ments to carry it to the highest pitch of completeness and 
finish, and if it belongs to any department of progressive 
knowledge, to bring it down to the latest moment in the his- 
tory of his subject. But a book once stereotyped is substan- 
tially immutable. To every suggestion of improvement, to 
every exposure of error, every announcement of advance- 
ment by other inquirers in the same field, and even to new 
thoughts growing out of his own researches or riper reflec- 
tions, the author must reply, with Pilate, " What I have 
written, I have written ! " and the criticisms of friends and 
foes alike are but arguments after judgment. The possession 



* The largest libraries which royal munificence founded in ancient times, 
admitting that the number of volumes has not been exaggerated, were, doubt- 
less, much inferior in quantity of matter to very many existing collections of 
printed books. The most extensive library before the invention of printing, of 
which we have credible accounts, was that of Tripoli in Syria, composed chiefly 
of Arabic books, and destroyed by the crusaders. Christian zealots have 
declaimed much against the barbarism of Omar, who is accused of the wanton 
destruction of the Alexandrian library, but how many of them have stigmatized 
the equally blind and culpable fanaticism which led the champions of the cross 
to burn the far larger collection at Tripoli, Cardinal Ci^neros to destroy eighty 
thousand Arabic manuscripts, and even Flechier to applaud Cardinal Xlmenea 
for having made an auto-da-fe of five thousand Korans '? 

See Viardot, Histoire des Arabes et des Mores d'Espagne, vol. i. chap. l t 
and vol. ii. chap. 2. Also, Revue Orientalc IT, 495. 

30 



4:66 INFLUENCES OF PRINTING. 

of a set of stereotype plates enables a capitalist to defy corn* 
petition. What printer will bring out a new edition of a book 
which he can afford at a dollar a volume, when he knows 
that his next-door neighbor, by means of his stereotype 
plates, can produce the same book in a form, which, in the 
uncritical judgment of the public, is little inferior, at half 
the price ? Hence the art of stereotyping is one of the 
means which strengthen the tyrannical monopoly of litera- 
ture to which I have before alluded ; and though it may 
serve to diffuse knowledge more widely, it tends to retard its 
real progress.* 

To strike the exact balance between the various influences 
of the art of printing, with its mechanical conditions, for 
good and for evil, is to earthly faculties impossible ; but 

* In England and the United States, where every book, for which a large 
circulation is expected, is stereotyped, the last edition differs from the first only 
in the title page, which is renewed every year as regularly as the Almanac. In 
Germany, where stereotyping is little practised, the small editions usually 
printed rapidly succeed each other, and almost always with considerable changes. 
A German scholar, in his first edition, generally examines and refutes all that 
has been advanced by other writers of all times and countries upon the same 
subject, and those who buy the first edition are fortunate if they do not soon 
find that the author has made that worthless, by refuting himself in the second. 
There is never an end to the "Last Words" and "More Last Words" of a 
German Baxter, so long as he lives, and you are safe in quoting his authority only 
from Ostern to Michaelis, and from Michaelis to Ostern, because every new 
M e s s e brings with it either a recantation of his former views, or an advance 
upon them. 

To speak seriously the intellectual independence and moral courage of 
Germany, and those habits of persevering and continued research, which forbid 
the scholars of that country to settle down upon the results of even their own 
investigations as final stereotyped conclusions, have been of infinite service in 
promoting the increase of knowledge and extending the sphere of human 
thought. 

I would gladly have added some speculations on the influence of the Tele- 
graph, and its inexorable "ten words," on language, but I have already perhaps 
devoted too much space to the consideration of the mechanical conditions 
which operate on human speech. 



INFLUENCES OF PRINTING. 467 

there can be no doubt that to the improvement of language, 
as a means of intercommunication between all the ranks of 
humanity, and therefore to the general elevation of humanity 
itself in the scale of being, it is the most important, the most 
beneficent of the inventions of man. 



LECTURE XXII. 

ORTHOEPICAL CHANGES IN ENGLISH. 

Few subjects belonging to the study of languages are 
more difficult of investigation than the successive changes in 
their pronunciation. They are difficult, because the memory 
of a man or a generation, which almost alone preserves the 
record of such changes, is not long enough to admit of 
mutations greater than the transposition of an accent, the 
lengthening or shortening of a vowel, and the like, and our 
vocal notation is so incomplete and irregular, that we are 
always doubtful what sound is represented by any given 
combination of letters, unless in the case of known words, 
which habit has rendered familiar to the ear. The obsolete 
words which occur in Chaucer and in Spenser are almost as 
uncertain in their sounds as if they belonged to an unknown 
tongue. We are, therefore, much in the dark as to the fact 
of a change in any given case, and it is seldom that we can 
say positively how any one word was pronounced a century 
ago. But in the few cases where the change is established, 
we are generally wholly unable to account for it. True, 
there are observed in all nations, all languages, tendencies to 
this or that revolution in pronunciation ; but whence these 



CAUSES OF ORTHOEPIC CHANGE. 469 

tendencies, what are their laws, and what co: nection have 
the j with changes in the signification of words, or their com- 
bination in periods?* In the case of a people like that of 

* The following remarks will illustrate what I mean by the connection 
between orthoepical and syntactical changes. In all languages, and especially 
in those where there is a marked tendency to the coalescence of successive 
articulations, as in Greek and in English, the pronunciation of consonants is 
much affected by the character of the sounds which precede or which follow 
them. In modern Greek, k preceded by 7 or by v, takes the sound of our g 
hard, and av kotttw is pronounced ang-goptoh ; if it is preceded by v, the v 
assumes the sound of ,u, and the ir of the English b ; consequently avu irovcp ia 
pronounced seem-boh-noh ; r following v generally sounds d, and ivrauSra is 
articulated en-ddf-thah ; ir preceded by fx is sounded as the European b. The 
consonantal sounds b and d begin no Greek word, and in writing foreign names, 
and borrowed words in which those sounds occur, the Greeks use for b the 
combination ix-k ; for d, the combination vt, so that Byron is spelled Mird'ipuv ; 
Bob would be Mirnjj.Tr ; dead, prevr ; and double, vto/jlttlK. It is conceivable, that 
foreign influence or other causes may so modify the inflections and syntax, that 
those finals and initials, which never occur in succession in one stage of a lan- 
guage, may very frequently be brought together in another, and, by their 
reciprocal influence, much modify the general articulation of the speech. 

Other interesting illustrations of the influence of articulations on each other 
will be found in the learned and curious History of the Greek alphabet by 
Professor Sophocles, second edition, Cambridge, 1854. 

On page 322, and in a note on page 323, I mentioned instances where the 
grammatical use of words had been changed for orthoepical reasons. Another 
example, where the form of a word has been affected by the confusion of 
sounds, is in the phrase ' God Hid you,' which occurs in As You Like It, III. 
S, and Y. 4. In Sylvester's Dubartas, edition of 1611, IIII Book, IIII Day of 
the II week, we have the form ' God dild you.' Speaking of the lovsr, who 
discovers that his mistress owes her fine complexion to art, he says : 

His cake is dough ; God dild you, he will none ; 
He leaves his suit, and thus he saith anon, &c. 

Gabriel Harvey, in a letter to Spenser, Hazlewood II. 300, writes the phrase, 
'Goddilge yee.' u Youre Latine Farewell is a goodly braue yonkerly peece of 
work, and Goddilge yee, I am always maruellously beholding vnto you, for your 
bountifull titles." These three forms are evidently one word. Where a conso- 
nant is repeated, we generally articulate it but once, and therefore ' God 'ild' and 
' God dild ' are hardly distinguishable by the ear. Dilge, again, is explained by the 
coalescence of the consonant d with the consonantal y of the following pronoun. 
The English g soft or j is generally considered as a compound consonant con- 
sisting of d and sh, but it may, with greater accuracy, be resolved into d and y 



470 ENGLISH AND THE GOTHIC LANGUAGES. 

early England, or of the modern United States, made up of 
a hundred elements, exposed to a thousand external influ- 
ences, we may see obvious causes of fluctuation in pronun- 
ciation ; but in sedentary, homogeneous races secured by po- 
sition from foreign contact, it is often impossible to suggest 
any explanation of orthoepic mutations. The people of Ice- 
land have been less exposed to external influences than any 
other civilized and cultivated nation of Europe, yet, while 
their grammar and their vocabulary have remained essen- 
tially unaltered, their pronunciation appears to have under- 
gone considerable changes. In Norway, a country also em- 
inently exempt from the action of extraneous forces, and 
which, seven centuries since, used the same language as that 
of Iceland, there has been a great revolution in the pronun- 
ciation of those words which remain the same in the dialects 
of both ; and this observation applies with no less force to 
Sweden, which is almost equally secluded from foreign in ■ 
fluences. I speak now wholly with reference to the pronun- 
ciation of words which have remained in use, in forms 
substantially the same, not of lexical or grammatical 
changes.* 

consonant. If to the word year we prefix a d, we obtain Jeer, and d-\-year more 
truly represents this sound than d-\-skear, which is, very nearly, d-\-s-\-year. 
Hence, God dilge ye is, in sound, almost exactly equivalent to God Hid ye. 

* Rask says that in ancient Icelandic, f, when not initial, had in all cases the 
sound of #, so that n a f n, name, was pronounced navn. In modern Icelandic, 
the same word is pronounced nabbn; the verb n e f na , (infinitive,) nebna, but 
the past tense, n e f n d i, as if written nemndi, and the participle ne fnt like 
nemnt. In the same words as used in the modern Scandinavian, the Danish has 
an orthography which doubtless once represented the original pronunciation, 
though now differently articulated. Nafn is in Danish written Navn, but the 
the av is pronounced like the German au or nearly our em, so that Navn and 
noun are much the same in sound. But in Sweden, the spelling and pronunci- 
ation correspond to the modern Icelandic articulation of the past tense and 
participle. Nafn is, in Swedish, n a m n ; n e f n a, n a m n a. 



ENGLISH AND THE GOTHIC LANGUAGES. 471 

Many of our English words vary much in pronuncia 
lion from their cognates in the other Gothic dialects, and 
while, on the one hand, it is difficult to suppose that their 
present articulation can be as widely distinct from their own 
primitive utterance, as it is from that of the same words in 
living Continental languages, it is, on the other, scarcely less 
go to imagine that the orthoepy of Anglo-Saxon differed from 
that of its Continental sisters as much as English pronuncia 
tion now does.* 

The pronunciation of Anglo-Saxon is a matter of very 
great uncertainty. The opinions of grammarians on this 
subject, however positively expressed, are little better than 
conjectures, and the explanation of the changes which are 
known to have occurred, is very obscure. With respect to 
the fluctuations in modern English, the difficulty is hardly 

* This discrepancy between the English (and probably Anglo-Saxon) and the 
Teutonic pronunciation of words identical in etymology and spelling, appears to 
me to add some weight to the opinions I have expressed concerning the essen- 
tially composite character of the Anglo-Saxon language, and its distinctness 
from the comparatively homogeneous dialects of the Teutonic stock. All these 
latter agree in rejecting the two sounds of the th (p and 5) which we have 
inherited from the Anglo-Saxon ; they pronounce, approximately, i like our e, 
and e like our a ; they have the softened 6 and il and the guttural and palatal 
ch and g, which are Avanting in English ; and they have not the English ch and 
j r or the Anglo-Saxon and English combination hw (wh). Our articulation, 
though very far from coinciding with that of the Scandinavian languages, 
nevertheless, on the whole, agrees with it more nearly than with that of the 
German. The vulgar New England pronunciation of the diphthong ou or oio, 
generally represented in writing it as provincial, by eow, prevails in several 
English local districts, as well as in some, at least, of the Frisian patois, and 
very possibly was once a normal sound in English, as it now is in Danish, where 
it is written ae v, or e v, as in R e v 1 e, revne, r e v s e, in which words it 
corresponds to the ou or ow in cow, round, house, in the Eastern pronunciation. 

Almost every sound which is characteristic of English orthoepy is met with 
in one or other of the Scandinavian languages, and almost all their peculiarities, 
except those of intonation, are found in English, while between our articulation 
and that of the German dialects most nearly related to Anglo-Saxon, ther« ar« 
many irreconcilable discrepancies. 



472 ENGLISH OETHOEPT. 

less, and it is increased by the notorious fact, that the differ 
ences of local pronunciation were, until within a very recent 
period, much greater than at present, so that when we have 
ascertained that a particular author pronounced in a particu- 
lar way, we are not always authorized to infer that he fol- 
lowed any generally recognized standard. 

The sources of information on the history of our pronun- 
ciation are, old treatises, expressly on English grammar and 
orthoepy, or on foreign languages in which comparisons are 
given between English and foreign sounds ; casual remarks 
of authors not writing professedly on this subject ; and, lastly 
and chiefly, poetical compositions. This last standard of 
comparison is not a sure guide, except in regard to accentua- 
tion, where, as the metre determines the quantity of each 
word, the only source of uncertainty is the doubt whether 
the author may not have displaced the accent by poetic 
license. In reference to rhymes, there is, first, the great dif- 
ficulty of determining the soraid of either of the words in 
the pair, whereby to test the pronunciation of the other, and 
then, the possibility that the rhymes, in a particular case, 
were of that imperfect class which necessity renders allowa- 
ble. The word heaven, for instance, has few perfect rhymes 
in English, and of these few, most are, like leaven, seven y 
eleven, words not likely to be used in the same couplet with 
heaven. The consequence is, that it is more frequently made 
to rhyme with given, driven, riven, striven, than with words 
exactly coincident with it in sound. A foreigner, knowing 
as little of the orthoepy of modern English as we do of that of 
the sixteenth century, would probably infer from a compar- 
ison of the examples where heaven is used in English poetry, 
that the combination ea was, in English orthography, equiv- 
alent to short i. Natives are of course liable to the same 



ACCENTUATION. 4:73 

error in arguing former identity of sound from former use in 
rhyme. 

In the Gothic and Romance languages, with the remarka 
ble exception of the French, the accentual system is perhaps 
the most marked characteristic of their articulation. It is 
that which the foreigner first becomes aware of, because, in 
the main, the accented syllable is the one most distinctly 
heard in listening to a strange language. Our means of 
knowing the ancient accentuation of English are, so far as 
they go, capable of a good deal of certainty, and the law of 
change on this subject is evidently that of throwing the stress 
of voice more and more back towards the initial syllables, 
in accordance with the general rule in the cognate tongues, 
so that English accentuation is becoming more and more An- 
glicized, so to speak, while the vocabulary is becoming Ro- 
manized. There are certain exceptions to this rule in this 
country, but I postpone the consideration of them until I ex- 
amine the tendencies of the language in America as con- 
trasted with those it manifests in England. 

The pronunciation of primitive English is a subject of 
much interest in many points of view, but most obviously 
with reference to the character of early versification, and 
especially to the question whether old English poems, as 
those of Chaucer and Gower, are strictly metrical, or merely, 
like the verses of Langland in Piers Ploughman, rhythmical. 
It is also linguistically important, because we cannot com- 
pare our etymology and our inflections with those of lan- 
guages nearly or remotely related, without knowing whether 
given sounds are expressed by the same signs in both. This 
uncertainty is a constant source of error in etymological re- 
search, and especially in the attempts to deduce native words 
from Oriental and other remote roots as written in European 



474 ORTHOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH. 

characters ; for the imperfection of our alphabet often obliges 
travellers and scholars, in recording foreign words, to use one 
letter to express two sounds very different to a trained ear, 
but for which our notation furnishes but a single sign. 

The collision between the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman- 
French orthographical and orthoepical systems, and the 
necessity of effecting a compromise between them, naturally 
drew the attention of English scholars, at a very early 
period, to the relation between sounds and the signs which 
represent them. The extract from the Ormulum given at 
the conclusion of Lecture XIX., shows that the writer had 
very carefully considered the subject ; and many of the man- 
uscript copies of Gower and Chaucer exhibit, in the uniform- 
ity and consistency of their orthography, like evidence that 
it had received thoughtful and thorough investigation. Sev- 
eral attempts were made in the sixteenth century to reform 
the spelling of English, which had been much corrupted by 
causes already described in previous lectures. Among these 
attempts, the system employed by Churchy arde in some of 
his poetical works, and ridiculed by Southey, under the name 
of " Churchy arde's Uglyography," is certainly not very in- 
viting to the eye, but it is by no means without merit. The 
orthography proposed by Alexander Gil, in his Logonomia 
Anglica, first published in 1619, is still better adapted to the 
expression of the sounds of the language, and has the further 
advantage of suggesting the etymology of all native words 
more clearly than most other efforts in the way of phono- 
graphic writing. It should be added, that the general conclu- 
sion to be drawn from the Logonomia is, that the change 
which has taken place in English pronunciation within two 
centuries and a half is, with one or two marked exceptions. 



UEFOKMS IN ENGLISH SPELLING. 472 

less than we should infer from our other sources of informa- 
tion on the subject. 

All the old English writers on orthography and pronun 
ciation fail alike, in the want of clear descriptive analysis of 
sounds, and of illustration by comparison with the orthoepy 
of other languages more stable and uniform in articulation. 
For this reason, and probably also on account of real dialec- 
tic differences of pronunciation between them,* they appear 
often to stand in very direct contradiction to each other, and 
it is quite impossible to reconcile or explain their discrepan- 
cies. Under these circumstances, no very precise and certain 
results can be arrived at, and I do not propound the opinions 
I am about to express, as generally supported by any thing 
more than a balance of probabilities. 

Whether the vowel a had in Anglo-Saxon the same gen- 
eral sound as in English, or if not, when the change in its 
force took place, cannot now be positively ascertained. The 
most important direct authority I am aware of with respect 
to the early pronunciation of this vowel in modern English, 
is that of Palsgrave, who, in his chapter on the French vowel, 
says : " The soundyng of #, which is most generally used 
throughout the Frenche tonge, is such as we use with us 

* Gil, who was a native of Lincolnshire, but resided in London as head- 
master of St. Paul's school, speaks of six dialects ; the common, the Northern, 
the Southern, the Eastern, the Western, and the poetic, but the exemplification? 
he gives point as often to differences in grammar and vocabulary, as in orthoepy. 
As instances of fluctuations in pronunciation, evidently with reference to whal 
he calls the common dialect, he says that you was pronounced both yow and yv. ■ 
toil, broil, soil, often tuil, bruil, suil ; shall either shal or shawl ; and buildeth. 
indifferently, buldeth, blledeth, beeldeth, and bildeth. This latter confusion must 
have arisen, not in popular speech, but from the embarrassment occasioned by 
a foreign orthography ; for though build is English, the vowel combination ui 
is not, except in a very few native words beginning with g and §-, in which 
latter case, u takes the place of w. 



476 



THE ENGLIStI A. 



where the best English is spoken, which is lyke as the Itai 
ians scrand a? There is no doubt that the Italian pronunci* 
ation of a was the same in the sixteenth century as at pres- 
ent, and hence it would appear that in Palsgrave's time, the 
normal English sound of a was as it is heard in father, or 
what orthoepists generally call the Italian a. Palsgrave 
gives no English example, but though his statement cannot 
be accepted in its full extent, there seems to be no good reason 
for doubting that this sound was much more common in older 
than in more recent English. French words, introduced col- 
loquially, would bring with them the French pronunciation, 
and in words derived from that source, some time would 
elapse before the vowels would take the sounds belonging to 
them in English orthography. But the orthography of 
Churchyarde shows that in words of Saxon etymology, as 
well as in many of French origin, the a was in his time pro- 
nounced as at present. He expresses this sound by ce, and 
writes meek, teem, ncem, meed, for make, tame, name, made, 
and flcem, deem, fcem, for flame, dame, fame. It is a famil- 
iarly known fact that a had, until within a comparatively 
short period, the broad sound, as in wall, in many cases 
where we now pronounce it either as in father or as in hat. 
Pen Jonson lays down the rule that this vowel before I, fol- 
lowed by another consonant, has always the broad sound, and 
he gives as examples the words salt, malt, balm, calm, in all 
of which he says the a sounds as in all, call, small, gall, 
fall and tall. Bawm is still the popular pronunciation of 
balm in many English and American localities, but calm is 
seldom or never heard with the broad a. Gil says that balm, 
fault and half were popularly pronounced bawm, fawt and 
hawf, (or in his phonographic system, bam, fat and haf,) but 



THE ENGLISH E. 



477 



that many scholars articulated the I, and He writes them 
balm, fault and half* The French nasal a would very nat- 
urally be changed in English into the broad a, to which it 
more nearly approximates than to the shorter sounds of this 
vowel, with which English writers on French pronunciation 
usually compare it, and accordingly Gil informs us that in adr 
vance, chance, France, demand, the a was sounded broad, as 
in tall ; and in dance, short or broad, indifferently, f 

In all the European languages, the pronunciation of e is 
a subject of much difficulty, for, by almost imperceptible 
gradations, it runs through the whole scale between a in fate, 
and ee in see, the latter sound being the equivalent of the 
Continental long i. Gil, in describing the vowels, says e is 
short in net, and long in neat. The short sound he represents 
by simple e, the long by e, and this vowel he distinguishes 
from the sound of ee in seen, keen, whether in words ordina- 
rily spelled with one e, as in he, with two, as in the words 
just quoted, or with ie, as in believe, shield. He also distin- 
guishes long e (e) from long a, which he represents by a. His 
standards for this latter sound are tale and male, and he 
employs the character a before the liquid r, as well as 
before other consonants, as, for example, in care, careful, 
which he uniformly spells car, earful. The long e (e) 
of Gil, then, was neither our a in fate, nor our e in be, 
and he discriminates between them all, not only in the 



* Mulcaster, p. 128, says calm, balm, calf, calves, salves, were pronounced in 
his time, cmvm, baiom, cawlf, cawves, sawves. 

t French-English pronouncing dictionaries generally give the a in the English 
sand as a near approximation to the French a nasalized in sans ; the o in the 
English bond as nearly the equivalent of o nasal in the French bon. The French 
nasal a is much better represented by Gil's a, and the nasal o is a more close 
Bound than our short o, and in fact approximates nearer to the English long o. 



478 THE ENGLISH E. 

examples I have cited, but in express and unequi voca, 
terms.* 

It is not easy to reconcile all Gil's examples with each 
other, or to determine what precise sound he indicates by the 
vowel e, for he employs it alike in words now pronounced 
with the sounds of e in be, e in let, and a in fate, and in others 
again where the present pronunciation is intermediate. In 
describing the vowels, he cites neat as an example of the 
sound of e, but in his table, the standard for it is beast, and 
the combination ea is almost always represented in his or- 
thography by e. Thus he writes dead, death, head, lead, 
(noun) pleasure, sweat, (present tense,) ded, deth, he'd, led, 
plezur, swet. In all these the vowel is now short e. Cleave, 
grease, leaf, leaves, sea, mean, meat, weak, wheat, in all which 
the vowel, as now pronounced, is the long e, he spells clev, 

* \<txvott)v autem illaui magnopere affectant Trvyo(XT6\ol nostras Mopsae, quae 
quidem ita omnia attenuant, ut a et o non aliter perhorrescere videantur quam 
Appius Claudius z, sic etiam nostras non emunt laun et kdmbrik, sindonis species, 
sed ten et kembrik ; nee edunt ktipn, caponcm, sed k'epn, et fere k'ipn ; nee 
unquam liguriunt bucherz met, butchers meate, i, carnem a laniis, sed biccherz 
m%t. Et quum sint omnes gintlimin, non gentlwimen, i, matronas nobiles, 
ancillas non vocant maidz sed m'edz. 

Logonomia Anglica, Second Edition, 1621, p. 17. 

The only instances in which Gil seems to confound the sound of ea and of 
long e with long i (ee) are in the words appear, which he spells appier, near spell 
nier, and dear spelt d'ier, upon which last word he remarks, " I cum e in diph- 
thongum coalescit in diet dama vel carus." 

Logonomia, p. 15. 

Eut the confusion is apparent only, not real. Dear and near certainly, and 
appear probably, were pronounced with the sound of long ee, and did not rhyme 
with fear, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and doubtless in Gil's 
time. At that period, almost the only orthoepical sign commonly employed in 
English was an acute accent, to indicate the long sound of e or ee, as may be 
seen in the old editions of Holinshed, and very many other authors of that time. 
Dear was then usually spelt deere ; near, neere ; whereas fear and most othet- 
words now written with that ending were spelt as at present, and without the 
accent. Numerous exemplifications of this will be found in Holinshed, as, fof 
instance, on pp. 368, 369, 370, 371, vol. III., reprint of 1808. See App. 65. 



THE ENGLISH E. 470 

gres, lef, levz, se, men, met, wek, whet. Break and great, at 
present sounded as if written brake and grate, are brek and 
gret in Gil's system, and forbear, earth, learned, swear, are 
forber, erth, lerned, swer. Heaven be spells sometimes hevn, 
and sometimes hevn. He also uses the same character to ex- 
press the vowel sound of e in Grecian, these, were, there % 
perch, theirs and they, writing Grecian, 3ez, wer, <5er, perch, 
6erz, and 3ei, though in one instance he spells this last word 
" thei or thai." 

Palsgrave, speaking of the French e, says : " Sometyme 
they sounde him lyke as we do in our tonge in beere, beest, 
peere, beene, but e in Frenche hath never such a sounde as we 
use to gjye him in a beere [bier] to lay a dead corpse on ; 
peere, a mate or fellow ; a bee, such as maketh honny, and as 
we sound our pronouns we, me, he, she" In Palsgrave's 
time, then, beast and bean, were pronounced, nearly at least, 
baste and bane, as they still are in Ireland, and provincially 
in England. Taking this statement in connection with the 
fact that Gil distiguishes e from both a and %, and comparing 
the words which he spells with e, I think we are authorized 
to conclude that he intended to indicate by it a sound cor- 
responding to that of e in the French f e t e , which, the An- 
glo-French dictionaries to the contrary notwithstanding, is not 
the sound of a in fate, but much more nearly that of e in 
there, as usually pronounced in New England. The e in 
there, in the New England pronunciation, is the long vowel 
corresponding to the short a in man, so that hair and hat, 
or, better still, pare and parry, care and carry, respectively 
exemplify the long and short sounds of the vowel.* 

* A passage in Harve} 7 ^ Letter to Spenser, Haslewood II. 281, though 
wiitten for another purpose, shows that/a?V and other words of like sound had 



4-80 TEE ENGLISH E. 

Most English orthoepists, I believe, now maintain that 
the sound of e in there, and of ai in pair, is identical with 
that of a in fate, and say that pair, a couple, is precisely 
equivalent in pronunciation to payer, he that pays. It is 
certain that, at least until very recently, educated persons in 
this country did make a distinction between these sounds, pre- 
cisely analogous in kind to that between the French e and e ; 
that is, a in pate and payer bore the same relation to a in 
pair, or e in there, that e in periode bears to e in pere. 
I cannot help thinking that the English themselves do at this 
moment, in practice, generally discriminate between these 
vowel sounds, though theoretically they deny the distinction. 
But neverthelesss, the authority of prononucing dictionaries 
is likely to prevail, and thus one of the radical sounds of the 
language, a sound which is a recognized orthoepical element 
in almost every known speech, will, not improbably, be ban- 
ished from the English tongue. The ignorance of gramma- 
rians has done much to corrupt our language, the dulness of 
orthoepists much to confuse our pronunciation. The inability 
of Walker and his school to distinguish between the sounds 
we are considering, is a fruit of the same obtusity of ear 
which led them to confound the y final of such words as 
society, with e in he, and thus to obliterate the distinction 



two pronunciations, one of which was probably with the vowel sound of a mfale, 
the other that referred to in the text: "Marry, I confesse, some wordes we 
have indeede, as, for example, faycr, either for beautifull, or for a Marte ; ayer 
both pro aere, and pro haerede * * which are commonly, and maye 
indifferently be used eyther wayes. For you shal as well, and as ordinarily 
heare fayer asfaire, and Aier, as Aire." Harvey is here particularly referring 
to the pronouncing of these words as monosyllables or as dissyllables. Now, by 
pronouncing them with the a in fate, we inevitably make them dissyllables, 
because our long a is diphthongal, but if we give the vowel the sound of e in 
the French f e te, they become monosyllabic, because the vowel is simple. 



THE ENGLISH I. 481 

between the long and short sounds, which characterizes espec- 
ially the orthoepy of all the Gothic languages. For a reason 
which will be given in another lecture, the vowel sounds and 
shades of sound are particularly numerous in those lan- 
guages, and the Gothic ear was keenly sensible to very sub 
tie distinctions, but we are diverging from their and our own 
primitive articulation, in all points but accentuation, and un- 
less a reaction takes place, we shall soon be reduced to as 
meagre a list of vowel sounds as belong to the Spanish or 
Italian.* 

The orthoepy of the vowel i is attended with less difficulty 
than that of e, and there is reason to think that the long and 
short sounds it serves to indicate have remained essentially 
unchanged for centuries. The analogy of the other Gothic 
languages would lead us to expect to find the short sound 
wherever the vowel is followed by two consonants in the 
same syllable, but, contrary to this rule, i before Id or nd is, 
in English, almost uniformly long. Churchyarde indeed gives 
to i in child the short sound as in did, will, but this is proba- 
bly either a misprint or a provincialism, for in the Ormulum, 
child, as well as hind, mind, wild, is spelt with a single liquid, 
which, in the orthography of that work, indicates that the 
preceding vowel is long. In chilldre, the plural of child, 

* By admitting that the words spelled by Gil with e were pronounced with 
the sound of French e, Italian e, German and Swedish «, and properly distin- 
guishing this vowel from our diphthongal long a, we bring early English orthoepy 
into harmony with that of the cognate languages, so far as respects a very largo 
class of words common to them all. We are, indeed, still left with the puzzling 
question, bow so many of them have lately acquired the sound of our modern 
long e, the Continental i. Of this I confess myself unable to offer a solution, 
but no philologist will deny that at some period of the Anglican tongue, the 
vowel in most of these wor-ds had the sound of the Continental e, and it is as 
ea3y to explain the change upon the supposition that it took place within two 
centuries, as upon the theory that it was made in the Angb-Saxon period. 
31 



482 THE ENGLISH I. 

on the contrary, the i is made short by reduplicating the l t 
whence it appears that in Ormin's time, or at least dialect, 
the singular and plural of this noun were distinguished much 
as at present. We pronounce the noun wind, in prose, with 
the short % in poetry often with the long vowel, but the verb 
to wind is always pronounced with i long. Neither of these 
words occurs in the Ormulum, but there are derivatives from 
both, and these are spelt with two nn, so that in the thirteenth 
century both probably took the short vowel.* 

It is an observation more familiar to foreign phonologists 
than to ourselves, that the English long vowels are nearly all 
diphthongs, that is, the proper long sound in combination with 
that of e, (the Continental i.) or in some cases u. Thus our 
a in day, and even in fate, is really a, (the Continental e,) +e. 
Churchyarde had detected this, and it is a proof of the acute- 
ness of his ear that he should have made so nice an observa- 
tion, though he is not always accurate in his resolution of the 
diphthong. He represents long a by ce, and writes make, 
mmk ; take, toek, and the like. The diphthongal character of 
our long vowels, though obvious enough in the case of a and 
e, is less so in o and u, where the subordinate element is the 
obscure u, but it is very palpable and conspicuous in the long i, 
which is a true diphthong, consisting of the a in father followed 
by e, and in many Continental languages the same or a very 
similar sound is represented by the combination ai. Church- 
yarde, mistaking the true character of i long, expresses it by 
ye, making y the principal, e the auxiliary vowel, and he 
writes whine, strike, respectively whyene, stryeke. John 
Knox, who was a contemporary of Churchyarde, founded 

* Gil, p. 10, spells the noun, wind, wjnd, w ich indicates the long sound of 
the vowel. 



LONG VOWELS DIPHTHONGAL. 483 

his orthography on a similar principle, but he employs the 
vowel i as the subordinate element, or sign of prosodical 
length, where Churchyarde uses e. Thus he spells make, 
maik; beer, heir ; beast, heist/ priest, jpreist ; like, 1/yik ; 
wife, wyif '/ restore, restoir ; and book, ~buik* 

Spenser, in his Mother Hubberds Tale, has these lines * 

Whilome (said she) before the world was civill, 
The Foxe and th' Ape, disliking of their evill 
And hard estate, determined to seeke 
Their fortunes farre abroad, lyeke with his lyeke. 

Here the e serves, not to lengthen the y, but as a diaeresis, 
to resolve the diphthong into its constituent parts, and make 
like an iambus. Whenever, in pronouncing such words as 
like, we dwell much on the vowel, it becomes very distinctly 
diphthongal, and we make the monosyllable a dissyllable, as 
Spenser, to help at once rhyme and metre, has done. The 
difference is barely this. In our ordinary pronunciation of 
the combination ae, represented by long i in English, we habit- 
ually accent the first vowel element, the a, and this articula- 
tion, a being sounded as in father, would be expressed by 
writing like, la-eke ; but if we transfer the accent to the e, 
the final element, we make it a dissyllable, la-eke. 

French words, transferred to English, naturally retain for 
some time the Continental pronunciation of this vowel, but 
in most combinations it tends to conform itself to English 
orthoepy. Oblige, for example, in its complimentary sense, 
is a word recently introduced from France, for this is a mean- 
ing unknown to Shakespeare, and, as a word of ceremonial 



* Other Scottish and English writers had adopted a similar orthography at an 
earlier period, but Knox is more consistent and uniform in his adherence to it, 
than King James, Bellenden, or any other writer of that nation whose works I 
have examined. 



484 THE ENGLISH O. 

phraseology, it was at first pronounced obleege, bnt it is now 
almost uniformly articulated with the English sound of i 
long. 

The vowel o is almost as vague and uncertain as e. "With 
respect to the long o, Gil differs very little from modern or- 
thoepists, but Churchy arde is not so easily reconciled with 
our present pronunciation. In accordance with his general 
system of vowel-notation, he represents long o by the com- 
bination oe, and writes in that way most of the syllables now 
sounded with long o, but he applies the same notation to 
many now pronounced very differently. Thus, school he 
writes skoel, poor poer, shoot shoett, lose loes, good goed, blood 
bloed, blush bloeshe, and push jpoeshe. On the other hand, 
Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie, denies that poor, 
or even door, is pronounced with long o. "If one should 
rime," says he, " to this word, (^restore,) he may not match 
him with doore or poors, for neither of both are of like ter- 
minant either by good orthography or in natural sound." * 
Ben Jonson ascribes to this letter two sounds. " In the long 
time," observes he, " o soundeth sharp and high," and he as- 
similates it to the Greek 12. This is evidently our long o in 
note, and our author cites that word, together with chosen, 
hosen, holy, open, over, throte and folly as exemplifying it. 
Jonson, therefore, must have pronounced folly as if written, 
f:ly, and in several of his poems he rhymes it with holy, 
which, indeed, would now be allowable, not as a perfect 
rhyme, but by poetic license. " In the short time," continues 
he, " it soundeth more flat and akin to u," and of this he cites 
as instances the words cosen, dozen, mother, brother, love and 

* Gil writes doors, dlirz. and of course ascribes to the oo in door the samt 
■ound as we now do in poor. 



THE ENGLISH O. 4.85 

prove. Had lie stopped here we should have inferred that 
prove was in Jonson's time pronounced pruv, because all his 
other examples have now the vowel sound of short u. But 
inasmuch as in a Latin note to this passage, he says that this 
sound was generally expressed in English by double oo, and 
that it corresponded exactly to the French ou, we should con- 
clude that the u to which he compares the short o was not 
the short u in but, but perhaps the u in full, (which is not 
related to u in but, but is a short vowel corresponding to long 
oo in pool,) and, consequently, that these words were pro- 
nounced respectively coosin, doozen, moother, broother, loove. 
In fact, Laneham, Spenser in his letter to Harvey, and many 
other authors of the latter part of the sixteenth century, write 
these very words with oo, and the frequency of such rhymes 
as love piwe, love move, would seem to lend some support to 
the theory that they were all pronounced as they would be 
according to our present orthoepy, if spelt with oo. But the 
question is by no means so easily disposed of. Gil says that 
u is " tenuis aut crassa : tenuis est in verbo tu vz, use, ut or ; 
crassa brevis est u, ut in pronomine us, nos;" and in his 
table of sounds, he employs the participle spun, as the stand- 
ard exemplication of this sound ; spoon, (in his orthography, 
spiln,) for long u. The short sound he indicates by the com- 
mon form of the vowel, and he spells dozen, brother, mother, 
love, respectively, duzn, brwSer, muter, luv, thus directly 
contradicting Jonson's rule, and assigning to these words a 
pronunciation precisely like that of our day. On the other 
hand, he uses the same vowel in many instances, where we 
now pronounce words with the normal sound of oo, as for 
example gud good, wud wood, wuma?i (sing.) woman, ful 
full, (and all the terminations in -ful short also,) push push 



486 THE ENGLISH U. 

hush bush, wul wool. Most of these words occur in numer- 
ous instances in the Logonomia, and though it seems improb- 
able that they were ever pronounced with the sound of u in 
us, yet they are too carefully distinguished from words with 
the long sound of oo to be supposed to be typographical 
errors. In the many other words where this very common 
English sound is met with, Gil's notation is in accordance 
with modern usage. Gil and Jonson were contemporaries, 
and both residents of London. To reconcile them seems im- 
possible, and we must therefore conclude that the pronuncia- 
tion of the words concerning which they disagree was very 
unsettled.* 

There has been some question whether the present pro- 
nunciation of u in nature, and other like combinations, is of 
recent origin, but the authority of Gil shows that it was em- 
ployed in his time, for he distinguishes the u in words of that 
termination both from u in us, and from the simple long u or 
oo in ooze, which he expresses by the character u. He spells 
nature and literature, natvr, liter atvr, employing the same 
sign as in use, which he writes vz, and those words must of 
course have been articulated much as they are at this day. 

* Mulcaster's observations upon the vowel o do not aid much in removing ? 
the difficulty. He remarks, p. 115, "0 soundeth as much upon the u which is 
his cosin, as upon the 6 which is his naturall ; as in cosen, dozen, mother, which 
o is still naturallie short, and hozen, frozen, mother, which o is naturallie long." 
On p. 152, he explains the apparent discrepancy in his notation of mother, by 
writing mother, the female parent, mother, mother, a slatternly girl, mother. 
On p. 116, he writes to, preposition, two, do, undo, remove, with the same sign 
as cozen, dozen, mother, whence we should irfer that the vowel sounds were 
alike, but he also writes glove, dove, and shove, in the same way. To the word 
love he assigns two sounds, love and love, one being the verb, the other the 
noun, though it does not appear which part of speech has the grave, and which 

the acute, accent. The rhyming poetry of that period (1575) might determine 

tfris question. 



CONSONANTS IN ENGLISH. 487 

Whether there were any true diphthongs in Old-English, 
and if not, when they were introduced, is a question which 
cannot now be answered. In the Ormulum, we have the 
vowel combinations,^ represented by a single character, and 
probably pronounced as a single vowel ; eo, usually repre- 
sented in modern orthography and perhaps orthoepy by ee / 
and the vowel and semi- vowel combinations aw, ew and ow. 
Besides these, w is used before all the vowels, and i long may 
have had the same diphthongal character as at present. After 
e and o always, and generally after #, the w is doubled, which 
implies that the vowel preceding was short ; and the proba- 
bility is that those combinations were articulated as true diph- 
thongs. The orthography of some old manuscripts seems to 
indicate a very full and distinct pronunciation of both ele- 
ments in these last combinations, as, for instance, in the met- 
rical romance of Sir Amadace, published by the Camden 
Society, where we find howundes, rowunde, powunde, com- 
mawund, for hounds, round, pound, command, (commaund ;) 
and in the Avowynge of King Arthur in the same volume, 
rowuntable, wowundes, rawunsone, encowunturinge, for round 
table, wounds, ransom, (raunson) and encountering. 

Consonants, though by no means unchangeable, are more 
stable than vowels, the law of their mutations is more con- 
stant, or at least better ascertained, and they frequently re- 
main fixed in the written, after they have been lost or 
changed in sound, in the spoken dialect.* Hence, in re- 

* The French orthography presents a wider discrepancy between the written 
and spoken dialects than any other European language. Landor, in his Conver- 
sation with Delille, asks, "What man of what nation, ancient or modern, could 
imagine the existence of a people on the same globe with himself, who employ 
the letters eaux to express the sound of of In fairness he should have 
allowed Delille, by way of set-off, to run through the list of sounds, simple and 
compound, which we express by the formidable combination, ough. The ety- 
mology of a large proportion of the French vocabulary is traceable only by itf 



488 CONSONANTS IN ENGLISH. 

searches into the history of language they are of cardinal 
importance, and consequently have almost exclusively en- 
gaged the attention of etymologists, while, on the other hand, 
their supposed permanence, immutability and distinctness of 
character have led them to be much neglected by orthoepists, 
as elements too constant, obvious and well understood, to re- 
quire much investigation or explanation. But in point of 
fact, consonants are very far from being so well discriminated 
or so durable constituents of spoken language as is generally 
assumed. It is true that their differences are generally more 
easily appreciated by the ear, though less easily imitated by 
the tongue, than those between vowels, but he who observes 
the indistinct articulation of consonants in Danish, the con- 
founding of the hard and soft sounds of g in some dialects 
of Arabic, and of I and r in the Polynesian islands, the sep- 
aration in Italian and Spanish of consonants which coalesce 
in English,* the almost inaudible difference between the two 

written forms, for, as articulated, the words often lose all resemblance to their 
originals, and it is the suppression or change of consonants that disguises them. 
Whether the orthography ever represented the pronunciation is very doubtful, 
and Genin has shown that some centuries since, the discrepancy was even 
greater than it is now. 

* I think what I have called the coalescence of consonants is more marked in 
English than in any of the sister tongues, except perhaps in Danish. It is par- 
ticularly obvious in our articulation of I, n, and r, followed by another conso- 
nant, and of I and r preceded by another consonant, in the same syllable, our 
pronunciation of which combinations is of a diphthongal character, while in 
Spanish and Italian these elements are as distinctly and independently articu- 
lated as any others. By way of compensation for this confusion of sound, we 
exaggerate the diaeresis of some consonants incapable of thus sliding into each 
other, and interpose an obscure vowel between them. Chasm and other words 
of similar ending are popularly pronounced as dissyllables, and in blossom, be- 
som, bosom, and chrisom we have introduced a written vowel between the s and 
m of the radicals. The consonant m does not readily unite even with a preced- 
ing liquid, and hence the vulgar pronunciation ellum, helium, for elm, helm, and 
the word alarum for alarm. It is perhaps in this reluctance of m to coalesce 
with a preceding liquid, that we find the explanation of the suppression of the / 
in balm, calm y and other words of similar ending. 



rHE ENGLISH B. 489 

& in some Oriental languages, not to speak of numerous other 
peculiarities of the like sort, will be convinced that our own 
consonants may deserve and repay a more careful study than 
English orthoepists have yet given them. The lower classes 
of the French Canadians habitually confound the mntes h 
and t, in certain combinations, and say meJcier, moiMe for 
metier, moitie. The double forms nuncius and nun - 
tius, and the like, show that the Romans did the same 
thing, if, as has been supposed, their c had always the force 
of Jc. An extraordinary instance of this particular confusion 
occurs in the remarks on pronunciation prefixed to the edition 
of Webster's large dictionary printed in 1828. In that essay, 
the lexicographer, whose most conspicuous defects were cer- 
tainly not those of the ear, after having devoted a lifetime to 
the study of English orthoepy and etymology, informs the 
student that, " The letters cl answering to hi are pronounced 
as if written tl / cZear, cZean, are pronounced ££ear, z^ean. Gl 
is pronounced dl ; glory is pronounced dlory." 

The pronunciation of the English consonants in general 
partakes of the stability which marks their articulation in 
other languages, and there is good reason to believe that it 
is, in this respect, more accordant with the Anglo-Saxon, than 
are the cognate Scandinavian dialects with their Old-Northern 
original. 

The h of the English alphabet is very pure and distinct in its 
pronunciation, showing no tendency to the more explosive ar- 
ticulation of some German dialects, or the more fricative of the 
Spanish, and I am aware of no reason for supposing that it has 
indergone any change as an element of English orthoepy.* 

* The pedant Holofcrnes in Love's Labor's Lost criticizes the pronunciation 
of the coxcomb Don Adriano de Armado, and calls him a ' racker of orthography, 1 
because he 'speaks dout fine, when he should say doubt; det when he should 



4:90 THE ENGLISH B. 

The Anglo-Saxon c had very probably the double force of 
the Italian c, representing, in different combinations, ch and &, 
which latter consonant did not properly belong to the native 
alphabet, though not absolutely unknown to it. "When it 
preceded n at the beginning of words as in cneow, knee, 
cndwan, to know, and cnotta, knot, there can be little doubt 
that it was pronounced, as Tc now is in similar combinations 
in modern German ; but it became silent soon after the Nor- 
man Conquest, and c has since undergone little if any change 
of sound. 



pronounce debt, d,e,b,t, not d,e,t.' The ingenious commentator of the excellent 
edition of Shakspeare now publishing in Boston, hence argues that consonants 
now silent were, in Shakspeare's time, heard on the lips of purists, and that the 
change from the ancient pronunciation, (in which he supposes these consonants 
to have been articulated,) to the modern in which they are silent, took place 
between 1575 and 1625, and he cites Butler's Grammar of 1633, to show that at 
that period b was not pronounced in either of the words in question, and was 
retained in spelling merely to show their derivation from the Latin. The only 
authority for the position that they ever were pronounced in English is the 
criticism of Holofernes which I have just cited. Holofernes is at once a pedant 
and an ignoramus. His English and his Latin are equally barbarous, and the 
testimony of such a person would be insufficient to establish the position, even 
if uncontradicted. But the evidence to the contrary appears to me strong, and 
I am persuaded that there never was a period when the b was commonly sounded 
in either word, though individuals may have been guilty of such an affectation. 
Debt and doubt are descended from the Latin words debeo and dubito, but 
we derived them from the French, not the Latin, at a period when French was 
as familiarly used in England as English itself, and of course, as in other cases, 
we took them with the French pronunciation. The arguments of Genin in his 
Recreations Philologiques, and the express words of Palsgrave, p. 26, show 
satisfactorily that in the French debte and doubte, the old forms of dette and doute, 
the b was not sounded even when it was written. Kobert of Gloucester, in the 
thirteenth century, p. *73, writes dette, and p. 89, doute. Bet, dette, dout, doute, 
and dought, were the regular spelling until after the Reformation, and numerous 
examples of these forms occur in Lord Berners' Froissart, and in other writers 
of that and earlier centuries. With the diffusion of classical literature, as I have 
elsewhere remarked, came in an orthography more consonant to etymology, but 
it was long before the orthoepy of the reformed words underwent a correspond- 
ing change. The combination bt is almost unpronounceable. It does not occui 
in Anglo-Saxon, and in that language even the pt of the cognate dialects passes 



THE ANGLO-SAXON 491 

The confusion into which Anglo-Saxcn orthography was 
thrown by the introduction of the Latin and French elements, 
bringing with them an alphabet differing more or less from 
the Saxon in the form and power of its letters, soon led to 
the abandonment of the characters not common to the or 
thography of both the native and the foreign tongues. The 
Saxon J> and 5, representing the two sounds of th, which 
were wanting in Latin and French, were dropped, and though 
there was much irregularity in the use of substitutes for 
them, d was very frequently employed for the 3, and f ad er, 
father, was accordingly written fader. The employment of 
d for two purposes occasioned confusion in orthoepy, and this 
consonant was not only sounded as th in native words origi- 
nally spelled with 5, but it took the th sound in some others, 
and sometimes even in Latin pronunciation. Palsgrave 
warns the pupil against pronouncing the d in the French 
words adoption, adoulcer, " like th, as we of our tonge do in 
these wordes of Latine, ath adjiwandum, for ad adjiwandum, 
corruptly." This explains Fluellen's pronunciation of adver- 
sary as adversary in Henry Y., advertised cited in Halliwell, 
and other like cases. The more general substitution of th for 

into ft. The combination ct presents no such difficulty, but we learn from 
Campion, (Haslewood's Collection II. 187,) that in 1602, perfect, though the c 
had now been introduced into the written language, was still pronounced perfet. 
Spenser rhymes set her and debtor ; shout and dout. Gil quotes the verses con- 
taining this last rhyme B. IV. C. III. 41, without remark, spelling doubt, dout; 
and on page 83, where there is no question of rhyme, be spells doubtful without 
the 6. B. Jonson, Ep. 71 to K. James, rhymes doubt and devout ; 73, letter and 
debtor ; 119, bet and debt. In these cases, as in hundreds of others, the pro- 
nunciation of the b would have destroyed the rhyme. It is then certain, that, 
before the Reformation, the b in these words was not even written ; the testi- 
mony of Gil shows that it was not pronounced in 1621 ; and that of Butler, 
cited by Mr. White, is positive that it was silent in 1633. We have also the 
evidence of rhyme that it was not pronounced in the interval, and Holofernef 
(s not a credible witness to the contrary. 



492 THE ENGLISH F AND G. 

6 has removed this source of embarrassment, and the cor so* 
nant d seems to have undergone no other change in articulation. 

F had formerly the sound of v more frequently than 
at present. In some provincial dialects it took and still 
retains the force of v, even when initial. Ben Jonson cites 
the participles cleft and left as both having the f sounded 
like f in of preposition, which he distinguishes as we do 
from the adverb off, and he compares the sound in of cleft, 
to the Latin v, that in off to the Greek $, but Gil ascribes to 
they in cleft its normal sound. The present tendency is to 
make the plural of nouns in rf like wharf, v&fs rather than 
ves, and/ in of probably retains the v sound, only to distin- 
guish it from off. 

G, in such words as length, strength, where we consider 
it a gross vulgarism to suppress it, appears to have been 
often silent. Churchyarde spells these words leynth, 
streynth / John Knox lenth and strenth. The same forms 
occur in the Political Songs published by the Camden Society, 
and Iialliwell gives several instances of the latter from old 
manuscript authorities. The combination gh was originally 
a guttural or perhaps a palatal, and it appears to have had 
this peculiar force even down to the time of Gil. " Grseco- 
rum X," says he, " in initio nunquam usurpamus ; in medio, 
et in fine, ssepe, et per gh male exprimimus." He proposes a 
special character to express this sound, as standards for which, 
he cites weight and enough, in the text, and oought in the 
table. He uniformly employs this character in high, Jcnight, 
though, through, and other words of the same ending, but 
remarks that, in the common dialect, enough was often pro- 
nounced enuff, instead of with the guttural. 

The rough aspirate h had formerly a much greater im* 



THE ENGLISH H. 



493 



portauce in the orthoepy of the European languages than it 
at present possesses. 

The Greeks and Komans certainly noimally articulated 
the Grecian rough breathing and the Latin A, but the mod- 
em Greeks, the Italians, the Spaniards and the Portuguese, 
have lost the sound altogether, though they still retain A in 
their orthography. It is scarcely heard in French, except in 
very emphatic utterance, and some orthoepists deny that it 
is used at all. The present tendency of all the European 
languages is to its absolute suppression, and it is not impos- 
sible that it may vanish from even our orthoepy as com- 
pletely as it has done from that of the South of Europe. 
There seems to have been a good deal of embarrassment with 
respect to the use of the letter A in the Latin language. 
Manuscripts and inscriptions often omit or misapply it, but 
its omission where it ought properly to be aspirated, was 
nevertheless regarded as a flagrant violation of the rules of 
good taste. " If one," says St. Augustine, freely translated, 
" contrary to the laws of orthoepy, murders the word hu- 
man by calling it icman, without the aspiration, he will more 
offend his hearers than if he had committed a real homi- 
cide."* The first step towards the abolition of the A in Eng- 
lish consisted in its suppression before the liquids I, n and r. 
In Anglo-Saxon ladder ■, ladle, lady, laugh, were all written 
with the. initial hi; the verb to neigh, neck, nut, with hn / 
ready, raven, ring, with hr, and this was also the orthography 
of the same words in the Old-Northern. What the precise 



* Ut qui ilia sonorum Vetera placita teneat aut doceat, si contra disciplinam 
grammaticam, sine aspiratione prima} syllabse, ominem dixerit, displiceat magia 
hominibus, quam si contra tua precepta hominem oderit, cum sit homo. 

Conf. I. 29. 



4:94 THE ENGLISH H. 

force of h was in this combination is uncertain, but as it is 
now a distinct rough, breathing in these words in Icelandic, 
it probably had the same sound in Saxon. It disappeared 
very early from English words of this class, and these com- 
binations do not occur in the Ormulum. A more important 
change in the use of the h was its transposition in words 
beginning with hw, (which is rather a Scandinavian than a 
Teutonic combination,) and its gradual suppression in the 
articulation of that combination. Saxon words beginning 
with hw are, in the Ormulum, in Layamon, and sometimes 
even in older Saxon authors, spelt with wh, and this derange- 
ment of the letters has been thought to indicate a difference 
of pronunciation. But in words of this class where we pro- 
nounce the h at all, we articulate it before the w, as for in- 
stance in whale. Although, therefore, in this combination 
the h orthographic ally follows, it orthoepically precedes the 
w, and this was probably the Anglo-Saxon pronunciation. 
Many of us remember when in white and other words of this 
class, at least in this country, the h was always distinctly 
heard, as it always ought to be. At present it is fast disap- 
pearing from this combination. This is a corruption which 
originated, not with the vulgar, but in French influence and 
the affectations of polished society. The combination of h 
and ?0, or h and v, occurs in the Scandinavian languages, but 
it does not at present exist in German.* In some of the 
Scandinavian local dialects, the h is still sounded before v, 
in others it is no longer heard, the influence of the Romance 
languages having there, as it has in a much more marked way 
in England, tended to bring about the suppression of the 

* Zahn and other earlier philologists recognize hw or hv as existing in Modso' 
Gothic orthoepy, but it is not admitted by Massraann, Diefenbach, or Stanam. 



THE ENGLISH L. 495 

aspiration. The process appears to have commenced at an 
early period, for Lord Berners wrote, or at least Pynson 
printed, wo and who, were and where, indifferently, and we 
may thence infer that the pronunciation had already begun 
to vacillate. Indeed, we find similar forms in Eobert of 
Gloucester, but these may be dialectic. 

The liquid I appears to have served in many combina- 
tions, in both early English and French, no other purpose 
than to lengthen, or otherwise modify, the vowel preceding ; 
but as it was undoubtedly always articulated in Saxon, its 
suppression in such words as half, calf, halm, calm, and the 
like, is to be ascribed, if not to the reason assigned in a note 
to a previous page, to Norman influence.* In many woids 
of Saxon origin, as for instance in could and would, it was 
generally pronounced until a recent period. The old New- 
England pronunciation of these words was coold, woold, and 
Ben Jonson writes Fid for Fd, the popular contraction of I 
would. In Gil's phonographic system, the l is always writ- 
ten in such words, and it was of course articulated. "We 
have, on the other hand, in conformity to the corrected or- 
thography of many words of French origin, recently intro- 
duced it in some cases where it was formerly silent. In the 
sixteenth century Englishmen wrote and pronounced soudr 
yours, assaut. At a later period, they spelt and articulated 
the I in both, and it is worth noticing that the French have 
done the same thing with respect to the former word, the 



* Laneham, in 15*75, wrote sJcro for scroll. This pronunciation suggests a 
probable etymology for a word which has much embarrassed lexicographers. 
The Icelandic noun skra means skin or parchment, whence the verbs skra, 
and s k r a s c t j a, to write or record. From skra comes the old Danish S k r a a > 
(pronounced skro,) a written ordinance or law, and I think also our scroll, and 
the Normau English escrow. Scrowis occurs in Wycliffe, Matth. XXIII, 5. 



4:96 THE ENGLISH R. 

s o u d a r d of older writers, itself a corruption of a still ear- 
lier form, souldard, having become the sold at of recent 
times. There are many instances in the English poetry of 
the sixteenth, and earlier centuries, where the liquid I stands 
for a syllable of itself. For example, the preterites or par- 
ticiples dazzled and humbled must have been pronounced as 
trisyllables, dazzeled, humbeled. Traces of this pronuncia- 
tion yet remain in both England and this country. Ignorant 
persons call the elm tree ellum, and helium is the regular 
nautical pronunciation of helm.* 

The former English pronunciation of the letter r was 
probably much the same as in the modern French. " R" 
says Ben Jonson, " is the dog's letter and hurreth in the 
sound, the tongue striking the inner palate with a trembling 
about the teeth. It is sounded firm in the beginning of 
words, and more liquid in the middle and end, as rarer, 
riper." 

The Anglo-Saxon alphabet, as I have more than once had 
occasion to observe, had two characters corresponding to those 
of the Icelandic, to express the two sounds of th, which are 
absurdly distinguished by many grammarians as respectively 
the flat and sharp articulations. According to analogy with 
the Old-Northern, the character f> should represent th in 
thin, or the Greek Q ; d", th in this, or the modern Greek A, 
and there is little doubt that this was their original force. 
But in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the two are often con- 
founded or interchangeably employed, and some grammari- 
ans have even supposed that in that orthography, their sounds 
were precisely the reverse of those appropriated to them in 
the Scandinavian alphabet. In any event it seems quite cer 

* See note at page 488. 



THE ENGLISH WH. 497 

tain that we have in many cases substituted the hard sound 
for the soft, and the contrary, though we cannot determine 
when the change took place. 

The recent introduction of the w, in the combination wh 
in several words, is remarkable. Whole, in the Saxon root, 
and the corresponding word in the cognate languages, were 
without the w, and whole and its derivatives were usually 
written without it in English, until the latter part of the six- 
teenth century.* So hot, which in Anglo-Saxon was spelt 
with h only, occasionally received a w at the same period. 
Whortleberry is an instance of the same sort. Whether the 
w was ever articulated in whole, wholesome or hot, we cannot 
determine, but it is difficult to account for its introduction on 
any other supposition. On the other hand, this semi-vowel 
has been rejected from the orthography of many words where 
it was once written and pronounced, and it is silent in pro- 
nunciation in many words where it is still written. Several 
Saxon words began with wl. These are all, I believe, obso- 
lete, though we have derivatives of two of them in luke- 
warm, and loth, loathe and loathsome. These last words, as 
well as one or two others, retained the initial w until the fif- 
teenth century, and it doubtless had some orthoepical force, 
though we cannot pronounce upon its precise character. It 
was unquestionably anciently articulated before r, in such 
words as write, wrong, wrench, &c. What its precise force 
was cannot now be ascertained, but it appears to have had a 
distinct sound in such combinations, to near the end of the 
sixteenth century and even later, if the authority of Mul- 

* Whole may possibly be from ths Anglo-Saxon walg; but the etymological 
analogies of the sister-tongues are to the contrary ; and as w never entered into 
the orthography of whole, until Anglo-Saxon was forgotten, the derivation from 
hal is more probable. 
32 



4:98 THE ENGLISH WH. 

caster and Gil is to be relied on. The former says in express 
terms, that w is a consonant in the word wrong, and Gil, 
whose phonography rejects all silent letters, retains the w in 
wrath, wrathful, wretch and wretched. 

From these remarks it will be evident that our present 
subject is involved in great obscurity, but, nevertheless, it 
seems a safe conclusion, that the pronunciation of our lan- 
guage has been upon the whole considerably softened, per- 
haps it would be more accurate to say, has become more con- 
fused, within the last two or three centuries, and is less clear, 
distinct and sonorous than it was in earlier ages. I have en- 
deavored to show, in a previous lecture, that the art of print- 
ing is exerting a restorative influence on English pronuncia- 
tion. The study of Anglo-Saxon and Old-English grammar 
will be attended with like results. We may, therefore, hope 
that the further corruption of our orthoepy will be arrested, 
and that we may recover something of the fulness and dis- 
tinctness of articulation, which appear to have characterized 
the ancient Anglican tongue. 



LECTURE XXIII. 

RHYME, 

An important difference between the great classes of lan- 
guages which we have considered in former lectures — those, 
namely, abounding in grammatical inflections, and those com- 
paratively destitute of them — is the more ready adaptability 
of the inflected tongues to the conventional forms of poetical 
composition. In other words, they more easily accommodate 
themselves to those laws of arrangement, sequence, and re- 
currence of sound — -of rhythm, metre and rhyme — by which 
verse addresses itself to the sensuous ear, and enables that 
organ, without reference to the subject, purport, or rhetorical 
character of a given writing, to determine whether it is 
poetry or prose. An obvious element in this facility of ap- 
plication to poetical use is the independence of the laws of 
position in syntax which belongs especially to inflected lan- 
guages, for it is evidently much easier to give a prosodical 
form to a period, if we are unrestricted in the arrangement 
of the words which compose it, than if the parts of speech 
are bound to a certain inflexible order of succession. Met- 
rical convenience has introduced inversion among the allow- 



500 ENGLISH POOR IN RHYMES. 

able licenses of English poetry, and some modern writers 
have indulged in it to a very questionable extent ; but at all 
events its use is necessarily very limited, and it cannot be 
employed at all without some loss of perspicuity. A more 
important poetical advantage of a flectional grammar, is the 
abundance of consonances which necessarily characterizes it. 
Wherever there are uniform terminations for number, gen- 
der, case, conjugation and other grammatical accidents, where 
there are augmentative, diminutive and frequentative forms, 
there of course there must be a corresponding copiousness 
of rhymes. English, possessing few inflections, has no large 
classes of similar endings. On the contrary, it is rich in 
variety of terminations, and for that reason poor in conso- 
nances. The number of English words which have no rhyme 
in the language, and which, of course, cannot be placed at 
the end of a line, is very great. Of the words in Walker's 
Rhyming Dictionary, five or six thousand at least are with- 
out rhymes, and consequently can be employed at the end of 
a verse only by transposing the accent, coupling them with 
an imperfect consonance, or constructing an artificial rhyme 
out of two words. Of this class are very many important 
words well adapted for poetic use, such as warmth, month, 
wolf, gulf, sylph, music, breadth, width, depth, silver, honor, 
virtue, worship, circle, epic, earthborn, iron, citron, author, 
echo / others, like courage, hero, which rhyme only with 
words that cannot be used in serious poetry ; others again 
which have but a single consonance, as babe astrolabe, length 
strength. Our poverty of rhyme is perhaps the greatest for- 
mal difficulty in English poetical composition. In the in- 
fancy of our literature, it was felt by Chaucer, who concludes 
the Complaint of Mars and Yen us with this lamentation : 



ENGLISH POOR IN RHYMES. 501 

And eke to me it is a great penaunce, 

Sith rime in English hath soch scarcite, 

To folow word by word the curiosite, 

Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce. 

The successors of Chancer have felt the burden of the em- 
barrassment, if they have not echoed the complaint. 

Walker's Rhyming Dictionary contains about thirty 
thousand words, inclnding the different inflected forms of 
the same word. In this list, the number of different endings 
is not less than fourteen or fifteen thousand, and inasmuch as 
there are in the same list five or six thousand words or end- 
ings without rhyme, as I have already stated, there remain 
about nine thousand rhymed endings to twenty-five thou- 
sand words, so that the average number of words to an end- 
ing, or, which comes to the same thing, the number of 
rhymes to the words capable of rhyming, would be less than 
three. The Rhyming Dictionary indeed contains scarcely 
half the English words admissible in poetry, and of those 
that form its vocabulary, many are wholly un-English and 
unauthorized, but there is no reason to suppose that the pro- 
portions would be changed by extending the list. 

If we compare our own with some of the Romance lan- 
guages, we shall find a surprising difference in the relative 
abundance and scarcity of rhymes. 

The Spanish poet Yriarte, in a note to his poem La Musi- 
ca, states the number of endings in that language at three 
thousand nine hundred only, among which are a large num- 
ber that occur only in a single word. Now as the Spanish 
vocabulary is a copious one, we shall be safe in saying that 
there are probably more than thirty thousand Spanish words 
capable of being employed in poetry. The inflections are 
very numerous, and while our verb love admits of but seven 



502 RHYMES IN SPANISH AND ITALIAN. 

forms, namely, love, loves, lovest, loveth, lovedest, loving and 
loved, the corresponding Spanish verb amar has more than 
fifty. Nouns distinguish the numbers ; pronouns and adjec- 
tives generally, and articles always, both genders and num- 
bers, and we may assume that the words, upon an average, 
admit of at least three forms. This would give about one 
hundred thousand forms with less than four thousand end- 
ings, or twenty-five rhymes to every word. This is but a 
rough estimate, and it must be observed that, from the strict- 
ness of the laws of Castilian prosody, as compared with the 
Italian, many rhymes, which Tasso would have used without 
scruple, would be disapproved in Spanish, except in ballads 
and other popular poetry. Words of the same class, whose 
consonance depends wholly on grammatical ending, are 
sparingly coupled, and absolute coincidence of sound is dis- 
allowed, as in most other languages. Hence, while am aba 
and call aba would b'e regarded as a license, hall aba and 
call aba would be inadmissible. For this reason, and be- 
cause also the article and other unimportant words cannot 
well be used at the end of a verse, the number of Spanish 
rhymes available in practice is considerably less than the cal- 
culation I have just given would make it. 

I am inclined to believe that the endings are more numer- 
ous, and consequently the rhymes fewer, in Italian than in 
Spanish, although still very abundant as compared with the 
poverty of English consonances ; and this may explain the 
greater freedom of the Italian poets in the use of them. 
Tasso even employs identical rhymes almost as liberally as 
Gower ; and in the second canto of the Gerusalemme Libe- 
rata I find the following pairs: Yiene conviene, face 
verb and face noun, voti devoti, immago mago, 
impone appone, irresolute solute, riveli veli, 



ITALIAN VERSIFICATION. 503 

esecutrice vendicatrice, volto participle and volto 
noun, spiri sospiri, lamenti rammenti tormenti, 
sole console, compiacque piacque, and nearly twen- 
ty more equally objectionable on the score of too perfect con 
sonance. 

Poverty in rhyme is one of the reasons why the tal 
ent of improvisation, so common and so astonishingly devel 
oped in degree in Italy, is almost unknown in England and 
among ourselves.* Besides the ease of rhyming, the gen- 
eral flexibility of the Italian language, and its great freedom 
of syntactical movement, as compared with the rigidity of 
most other European tongues, adapt it to the rhythmical 
structure of verse as remarkably as the abundance of similar 
inflectional endings facilitates the search for rhymes. It is 
this quality of flexibility of arrangement which gives it so 
great an advantage over the Spanish in ease of versification, 



* To those who have not witnessed the readiness and dexterity of Italian 
improvisatori, their performances are incredible, and they are perhaps even 
more inexplicable to those who have listened to them. The following is an in- 
stance which fell under my own observation : An eminent improvisatore, in 
spending an evening in a private circle, was invited to give some specimens of 
his art. He composed and declaimed several short poems on subjects suggested 
by us, with scarcely a moment's preparation. They were in a great variety of 
metres, and very often accommodated to bouts rimes, or blank rhymes, furnished 
by the party, and purposely made as disparate as possible. In one instance, he 
communicated to me privately the general scope of thought to be woven into a 
sonnet, and proposed that the party should furnish the blank rhymes, a subject, 
and two lines from any Italian poet which might occur to us. He was then to 
accommodate the proposed train of thought to the rhymes and the subject, and 
to introduce the two verses which should be suggested. The rhymes were pre- 
pared, and the subject given was the Penknife. I rememoer but one of the 
lines which he was required to interweave. It was, 

Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella ! 
(Depart in peace, fair and blessed sou! !) 

The sonnet, really a very spirited one, was composed and ready for delivery in 
less time than we had spent in collecting and arranging the rhymes. 



504 CLASSICAL POETRY TJSTRnYMED. 

notwithstanding the greater number of like terminations in 
the latter. The structure of the Spanish period, whether in 
poetry or in prose, is comparatively cumbrous and formal ; 
there are fewer dactylic feet, and less variety of accentuation ; 
and hence it does not so readily accommodate itself to a met- 
rical disposition of words as the Italian, which has the addi- 
tional convenience of dropping or retaining the final vowel 
in many eases at pleasure. 

It has been thought singular that with the multitude of 
like terminations, and the great sensibility of the Greek and 
Latin ear, neither rhyme, alliteration nor accent should have 
become metrical elements, but that, on the contrary, repetition 
of sound in all its forms should have been sedulously avoided. 
But the very abundance of similar endings suggests the 
reason why they were not used as a formal ingredient in the 
structure of verse. That which constantly forces itself upon 
us we do not seek after, but rather aim to avoid. It would, 
therefore, have been a departure from the principles of a taste 
so fastidious as that of the classic ages, artificially to multiply 
and emphasize coincidences of sound which, by the laws of 
the language, were continually presenting themselves unso- 
licited. The frequent recurrence of like sounds in those lan- 
guages was unavoidable ; it was a grammatical necessity, and 
if such sounds had been designedly introduced as rhymes, 
and thus made still more conspicuous, they could not but 
have been as offensive to the delicacy of ancient ears as ex- 
cessive alliteration is to our own. To them such obvious co- 
incidences appeared too gross to be regarded as proper in- 
strumentalities in so etherial an art as poetry, and they con- 
structed a prosody depending simply upon the subtilest 
element of articulation, the quantity or relative length of 
the vowels. 



1N0EENT VERSIFICATION. 505 

The fastidiousness of taste increases with its refinement, 
and indeed, in many cases, the one is but another name for 
the other. When the poetic forms of classic Greece and 
Home became more multifarious, and the rules of prosody 
and metrical structure more and more distinctly defined, we 
observe greater care in the avoidance, not merely of end- 
rhymes, but of all repetitions of sound, both in poetry and 
prose. There are some traces of the employment of 
rhyme and assonance in mere popular literature at a very 
remote period ; and though none of the great poets of an- 
tiquity are supposed to have intentionally introduced either, 
yet their comparatively frequent occurrence in the works of 
Hesiod seems to show that in his time no very great pains 
were taken to exclude them. The extant works of Hesiod 
comprise about twenty-three hundred lines or verses, and I 
find in these poems thirty pairs of consecutive rhymes, and 
about twenty instances where the same termination occurs 
with one or two intervening verses. In twice that number 
of verses in the Iliad and the Odyssey, I observe but twenty 
pairs of consecutive rhymes, generally repetitions of the 
same words, and about thirty recurrences of rhymes separated 
by one or two lines. The difference between the two poets 
is not likely to have been accidental, and it is not improba- 
ble that the more numerous critical revisions which the works 
of Homer passed through, eliminated some instances of what 
to the Greek ear was offensive. The rhymes in Hesiod in 
many cases occur in catalogues of proper names, and it is 
possible that they were designedly employed as helps to the 
memory, which would be more needed in a mere list of names 
than in a connected narrative. It should be observed with 
reference to both Hesiod and Homer, that the ancient accent- 
uation in many instances doubtless made the rhymes much 



506 REPETITION OF SOUNI/S. 

less conspicuous to the ear than they are by the modern 
modes of scanning, but still they could hardly have failed tc 
be noticed. 

The ancients in general avoi/ Led resemblances of sound in 
prose with almost equal solicitu le, though they were perhaps 
e^en less scrupulous with regard to the repetition of the same 
word than we are in English ; but there are passages in some 
of the more primitive prose writers where coincidence of 
syllable seem almost sought for. There is an example of this 
in Herodotus, familiar to every school-boy : 

to?(Ti trapa crtpiai yiuo^voiai KpoKoSeiXoicri roiat iv rya-i aifxaaiyai. 

The monotony of this passage must have struck every ear, 
and if, as some suppose, the ancient Greeks, like the modern, 
pronounced the diphthong 01 like i or our long 0, the effect of 
so many repetitions must have been still more disagreeable. 
It would seem, then, that in the less artificial periods of Greek 
literature, coincidence of sound, in poetry and prose, if un- 
sought for, was yet not very scrupulously avoided, and the 
systematic rejection of it is one of the refinements of a later 
age. There are, however, many instances where fastidious 
Greek and Latin writers of the most polished ages of ancient 
literature have, intentionally or unintentionally, admitted 
more or less perfect consonances and repetitions of sound. 
Ovid has many rhyming couplets, and Cicero says in prose, 
"bellum autem ita suscipiatur ut nihil aliud nisi pax 
quaesita videatur," Landor notes that the great orator 
in one of his moral treatises uses the verb possum in some 
of its forms seven times in fourteen lines. The same critical 
trifler has spent some of his many hours of laborious idleness 
in bunting up cacophonies of various sorts in Plato, to whom 
he geems to owe a particular grudge ; but, nevertheless, it 



REPETITION )F SOUNDS. 507 

Was certainly a rule of both Greek and Latin composition^ 
that all coincidences of sound, except those of quantity in 
verse, were to be avoided. 

Notwithstanding the modern love of consonance, we in 
general abstain from it where it is not essential to the form 
of composition employed, and a rhyming couplet in blank 
verse, except occasionally at the end of a paragraph in dra- 
matic or dithyrambic poetry, is felt at once as an unwarrant- 
able license. Rhyme strikes us no less disagreeably, if it 
happens to occur between two emphatic words in prose, as 
does also a metrical structure, which, unless it is wholly ac- 
cidental, has much the same effect as a dancing step m the 
walk of a reverend senior. Those who are acquainted with 
the admirably told German tales of Musseus, will remember 
the comic, mock-heroic air thrown over the narrative by the 
occasional introduction of a succession of iambics, and our 
newspapers often contain prose articles rendered equally lu- 
dicrous by interspersing rhyming words now and then. There 
are indeed instances in rhetoric, both ancient and modern, of 
the happy employment of like sounds, but the attempt to 
introduce them artificially into oratory, generally serves no 
other purpose than to exemplify the proverb, and to prove ex- 
perimentally that " there is but a step from the sublime to 
the ridiculous." It is remarkable that neither the fine ear of 
Fisher Ames, nor the taste of his dignified audience, were 
offended by the repetitions of sound in a passage of his cele- 
brated speech on the British Treaty : " This day we un 
dertake to render account to the widows and orphans whom 
our decision will make ; to the wretches that will be roasted 
at the stake i to our country, &c, &c." Here, of course, 
the consonance could not have been other than an accidental 
one, but it does not appear to have been noticed as a blemish, 



608 ANCIENT POEMS CHANTED. 

though in general such coincidences are peculiarly .lisagree 
able. The Spanish ear is so nice on this point, according tc 
an eminent writer of that nation, that the asonante, or im- 
perfect rhyme, where the vowels are the same, with different 
consonants, as fame, state, make, cane, though it is employed 
as an element of verse in certain poetic forms, is offensive in 
prose, if the asonantes happen to terminate two or three 
phrases or members of a period in near succession.* 

There is perhaps a further reason why coincidence of 
sound should have been unsought on the one hand, and dis- 
regarded on the other, if it chanced to occur in Greek poetry. 
The bardic lays of ancient Greece were probably not com- 
mitted to writing, and they were chanted or sung at enter- 
tainments, public or private. Now, though persons taught 
the modern school-boy sing-song way of reading poetry 
strongly emphasize the rhyme, yet in singing, or in modu- 
lated recitation, we scarcely observe it when it occurs, or miss 
it when it does not. We cannot indeed positively say that a 
like difference existed between ancient reading and chanting, 
but it is not violently improbable that when the Theogony or 
the Works and Days of Hesiod were sung by the author or his 
successors, his rhymes may have passed unnoticed ; and with 
respect to Homer, whose immortal poems were handed down 
from age to age by oral delivery and transmission, it may be 
supposed, as already hinted, that when they were written 
down, and edited, as we know they were, by a long succes- 
sion of copyists and scholiasts, original peculiarities, now 
felt to be unpleasant departures from the received canons of 
poetry, were struck out. 

* Aim en la prosa les ofende el mero asonante quando se halla en palabraa 
que terminan el sentido de frases poco distantes unas de otras. — Yriarte, note* 
to La Mtisica. 



ORIGIN OF RHYME. 509 

To discuss the historical origin of rhyming versification 
would lead me too far from my subject. The word rhyme 
is not derived from the Grseco-Latin rhythmus. It is of 
original Gothic stock, and ought to cast off the Greek garb, 
in which the pedantic affectation of classical partialities, 
and the desire to help the theory that ascribes to the thing, 
as well as to the name, a Latin origin, have dressed it. The 
proper spelling is simply rime, and though rhyming cannot 
be shown to have been practised among the Gothic tribes 
earlier than elsewhere in Europe and the East, yet it proba- 
bly sprung up among them spontaneously, as the natural 
poetical form of the language, just as it did among some of 
the Oriental nations. In any event, the current supposition 
that its first invention belongs to the monkish poetry of the 
middle ages, and that other modern theory which traces it 
to the Celtic bards, rest alike on a very insufficient founda- 
tion. But whether it was indigenous to the Gothic nations 
or nof, ^ fell in so naturally with the love of alliteration and 
other coincidence of sound which characterizes all the 
branches of that great family, that it found ready acceptance 
among them as soon as models of rhyming versification were 
presented to them. 

The passionate admirers of classical literature in the six- 
teenth century stoutly opposed the employment of rhyme, as 
a barbarous innovation on the consecrated forms of the art. 
Roger Ascham says, that Cheke and Watson held our " rude 
beggarly rhyming to have been first brought into Italy by 
Gothes and Hunnes," and that to " follow rather the Gothes 
in rhyming than the Greekes in trew versifying, were even 
to eate acornes with swyne, when we may freely eate wheate 
bread amonges men." Sir Philip Sidney complains of con- 
temporaneous English poetry that " one verse did but beget 



510 BEN JONSON ON RHYME. 

another ; " and so the whole became " a confused masse of 
words with a tinkling sonnd of ryme barely accompanied 
with reason."* But this is probably to be regarded less as a 
censure of the nse than of the abuse of rhyme, for though 
he himself composed in almost all known ancient metres, yet 
he wrote by preference in rhymed verse, and used double, 
triple and compounded rhymes with great freedom. He 
moreover formally defends rhyme in the following passage : 

" Now of versifying there are two sorts, the one ancient 
the other moderne : the ancient marked the quantitie of 
each syllable, and according to that framed his verse : the 
moderne observing only number, with some regard of the 
accent, the chief life of it standeth in that like sounding of 
the words, which we call ryme. Whether of these be the 
more excellent, would beare many speeches, the ancient, no 
doubt, more fit for musicke, both words and time observing 
quantity, and more fit lively to expresse divers passions, by 
the low or lofty sound of the well-weighed syllable. The 
latter likewise with his ryme striketh a certain musicke to the 
ear, and in fine, since it doth delight, though by another way, 
it obtaineth the same purpose, there being in either sweetnesse, 
and wanting in neither, Majestie, and truly the English, be- 
fore any vulgar language I know, is fit for both sorts." 

Ben Jonson's opinion of rhyming verse was more unfa-* 
vo* able, and he thus expresses his dislike of it : 

Rime, the ruck of finest wits, 
That expresseth but by fits 

True conceits, 
Spoiling senses of their treasure, 
Cosening judgment with a measure, 

But false weight, 

* Defence of Poesie, ninth edition, p. 561. 



MILTON ON RHYME. 511 

Wresting words from their true calling, 
Propping verse for fear of falling 

To the ground, 
Joining syllables, drowning letters, 
Fasting vowels, as with fetters, 

They were bound, 

He that first invented thee, 
May his joints tormented be, 

Cramp' d forever ! 
Still may syllables jarre with time, 
Still may reason warre with rime 

Resting never, &c, &c. 

Milton condemns rhyme as " the Invention of a barbarous 
Age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre ; grac't in- 
deed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried 
away by custom, but much to their own vexation hindrance 
and constraint, to express many things otherwise and for the 
most part worse then else they would have exprest them 
***** a thing of itself to all judicious eares triveal and 
of no true musical delight ; " and he congratulates himself 
on having in Paradise Lost set the first example in English 
epic of avoiding " the jingling sound of like endings," and 
thus restored " to Heroic Poem ancient liberty from the 
troublesome and modern bondage of rimeing." 

It can hardly be said that Milton's experiment was a suc- 
cessful one, for the slowness with which his great poem won 
its way to public favor is doubtless in some measure to be 
ascribed to its rejection of what the English ear demanded as 
an essential constituent of the poetic form. Milton has had 
many imitators, but blank verse has as yet established itself 
as a legitimate mode of English versification only in the he- 
roic metre. The final rejection of rhyme from the metrical 
Bystem of our language is as improbable, indeed as impossible 
we may say, as the abandonment of accentual rhythm and 
the return to prosodical quantity. 



.512 PREDOMINANCE OF RHYME. 

Until the seventeenth century, the ear of modern Europe 
was so little wearied with rhyme,, that in spite of the protes- 
tations of the classical school, it fairly revelled in this new 
element of metrical sweetness. The same rhyme was often 
carried through a great number of verses, and in many poema 
all the stanzas have the same set of terminations, a sufficient 
variety to satisfy the taste of the times being obtained by 
differently arranging the rhymes in consecutive stanzas. Sa- 
tiety at last produced a reaction which concurred with other 
influences in restricting the use of like endings, and we often 
meet with evidences of a disposition to avoid the use of repe- 
titions of sound in prose. Thus, the Germans say A u f - und 
"N i e d e r gang for A u f g a n g und Niedergang, the Span- 
iards facil-y subitamente for facilmente y subita- 
mente, and we fair- and softly, for fairly and softly. The 
Tuscan Canzone, in which the consonances are " few and far 
between," shows that even the rhyme-loving Italian feels the 
necessity of making the recurrence of this ornament less fre- 
quent, and its regularity less palpable, in the highest order 
of lyric poetry, than in lighter compositions. The modern 
license in the use of rhymes has grown, in great measure, 
out of a wearinesss of perpetual repetition, but it is partly 
founded on the example of earlier poets, who are mistaken- 
ly supposed often to have used imperfect rhymes, when in 
fact, in the orthoepy of their times, the consonance was 
complete. 

The articulation, and, consequently, the prosody of lan- 
guages is much affected by the character of their grammatical 
inflections. "Wl^ere inflections exist, the syntactical relations 
of the words and the intelligibility of the period depend 
upon them, and they must consequently be pronounced with 
a certain distinctness. The orthoepy of most languages in- 



INFLECTION AND ARTICULATION. 513 

clines to make the inflectional element conspicuous. If it 
consists in the addition of syllables to the radical, then a 
principal, or at least a secondary accent will fall upon some 
of the variable syllables. The vowels, though few in num- 
ber, will be of frequent occurrence, open in articulation, and 
broadly distinguished from each other. The consonants will 
be clear and detached in their pronunciation. If inflection is 
made by vowel-change, the vowels will be numerous and 
subtilely distinguished, and the consonants, though more nu- 
merous, will become relatively less prominent. Examples 
of this may be found on the one hand in the small number 
of vowel-sounds and the clear, staccato articulation of the 
consonants in Italian and Spanish, and on the other in the 
obscurity of the consonants, and the multiplied shades of 
vowel-sound in the Danish. So long as the predominant 
mode of inflection in English was by the letter-change, the 
attention was constantly drawn to the essential quality of the 
vowel, and even a slight difference in this respect struck the 
ear more forcibly than at present, when inflection by termi- 
nal augment is so common. Hence, a departure from the 
law of strict consonance was much less likely to be tolerated, 
and I am persuaded that the number of imperfect rhymes in 
old English authors will be found to be constantly fewer as 
we advance in the knowledge of their orthoepy. 

After the introduction of Norman words, with their aug- 
mentative inflections, the system of letter-change fell into 
great confusion, and all well-grounded principle of declension 
and conjugation seems to have been lost sight of. The de- 
rangement of the strong inflecticns continued for centuries, 
and the poets took advantage of this to vary the characterise 
tic vowel in almost any way that suited the convenience of 
33 



514 rOETIC LICENSES. 

their rhymes. Guest sneers at the ignorance of those who 
suppose that Spenser's licenses in this respect were unauthor 
ized innovations of his own, but I cannot assent to this view 
of the subject. For though Spenser may have found in bal 
lads and other popular literature precedents for most of 
his inflectional extravagances, yet some of them, at least, were 
violations of the analogies of the language, and without the 
sanction of any real authoritative example. But the licenses 
of Spenser were by no means limited to anomalous vowel- 
changes, for he abbreviated or elongated words for the sake 
of rhythm or consonance as unscrupulously as he substituted 
an open vowel for a close, or the contrary. We have already 
seen that he resolved the diphthongal i into its elements, and 
made like a dissyllable rhyming with seek, and with equal 
boldness he cuts down cherish to cherry, that he may pair it 
oif with merry, embathe to embay, for the sake of a rhyme to 
away, and converts contrary into a verb by dropping the 
tinal vowel ; on the other hand he lengthens nobless into no- 
teless, and dazzled into dazzeled. Thomas Heywood uses 
double and triple rhymes with much grace and dexterity, and 
it is the more remarkable that so expert a versifier should 
have allowed himself to disguise so important a word as 
Deity for the sake of a consonance : 

By the reflex of Iustice and true Piety, 
It drawes to contemplation of a Diety. 

This, however, is but a tame license compared to that by 
which, in the third book of the Hierarchie, he reduces the 
goodly polysyllable intoxicated to the humble form of Hoxt.* 

* On the same page (edition of 1635, p. 134) there is a catachresis in the 
employment of indenturing, which makes it very enigmatical to all readers ex- 
cept those who know how legal indentures were anciently drawn up and cut 
upart. 



REPETITION OF RHYMES. 515 

But Heywood, like many old English writers, was of opinion 
that man is the lord, not the slave of language, and he often 
proved a hard master to the words that served him. 

The great number of English words which are incapable 
of rhyme, and the few which agree in any one of our numer- 
ous endings, reduce the poet to a very limited variety of 
choice, and there are many pairs of words which are found 
as invariably together as length and strength, breath and 
death, or wealth and stealth, gold and cold. When you see 
frivolity at the end of a line, you do not need your eyes to 
tell you that jollity cannot be far off; mountains and foun- 
tains are as indissolubly united in rhyme as they are in phys- 
ical geography, and if a poet qualifies an object as frigid, he 
never fails to inform you in the next line that it is also 
rigid. 

The consequence of this perpetual repetition is a weari- 
ness of all exactness in rhymes, and a tendency to great 
license in the use of imperfect consonances. The proper re- 
lief is to be found, not in a self-indulgent laxity, a repudia- 
tion of the fetters of verse, bnt in a bold return to the poeti- 
cal wealth, both of form and substance, of our ancient 
tongue ; and the certainty that we shall there find unex- 
hausted, though long neglected, mines of ores and gems, 
should be, for poetic natures, an argument of no small force 
for the study of primitive English. 

There are, in both the Gothic and the Romance languages, 
equivalents or substitutes for rhyme, some of which have not 
been employed at all, others not systematically, in English 
poetry. The introduction of them well deserves inquiry, and 
the character of these devices, and the possibility of their 
restoration as metrical elements will be considered and illus- 
trated in other lectures. 



LECTURE XXIV. 

ACCENTUATION AND DOUBLE KHYMES. 

The modes of consonance which may be, and j different 
nations have been, employed as essential elements of the poet- 
ical form, are very various. The prosody or metrical system 
of the classical languages is founded on quantity, that of 
modern literature on accentuation. Each system necessarily 
excludes the characteristic element of the other, not indeed 
from accidental coincidence, or altogether, from consideration 
in practice, but from theoretical importance as an ingredient 
in poetic measure. Quantity, as employed by the ancients, 
has been generally supposed to consist simply in the length 
or relative duration of different syllables in time of utter- 
ance.* To us, mere quantity is so inappreciable, that we 

* The terms long and short, employed in popular English orthoepy, are 
usually wholly misapplied. Most of our vowels have two long sounds, and the 
corresponding short sounds are often expressed not by the same, but by differ- 
ent letters. The propriety of the terms long and short, as truly descriptive ap- 
pellations, expressive, simply, of relative duration in time, is, to say the least, 
very questionable, even when applied to cases where the same character is em- 
ployed for both. It is not true that short sounds, simply by a more leisurely 
utterance, necessarily pass into long ones, and vice versa, for if so, the short 
vowels of a slow delivery would be the long ones of a rapid pronunciation, which 
is by no means the fact. An attentive examination of the position of the organ* 



ANCIENT METRES. 



517 



cannot comprehend how it could be made the basis of a met 
rical system. It is difficult to believe that, with any suppos- 
able sensibility of ear to the flow of time, a prosody could 
have been founded on that single accident of sound, and 
we cannot resist the persuasion that there entered into ancient 
prosody some yet undiscovered element, some peculiarity ot 
articulation or intonation, that was as influential as the mere 
temporal length of vowels in giving a rhythmical character 
to a succession of syllables which, with the supposed an- 
cient accentuation, is, to our ears, undistinguishable from 
prose. 

Although, for want of appropriate native terms, we em- 
ploy Latin and Greek designations of feet and measures, yet 
our modern accentual rhythm is in no sense an equivalent of 
the ancient temporal prosody, as it has sometimes been con- 
sidered, but it is its representative, and, like some other rep- 
resentatives, very far from being a truthful expression of the 
primary constituency for which it answers. It is for this 
reason that every attempt to naturalize the classical metres in 
English verse, except in the very disputable case of the hex- 
ameter, has proved a palpable failure, and is in fact a delu- 
sion, because, from the want of parity between accent and 
quantity, they cannot strike the ear alike, and therefore the 
eye alone, or the fingers which count off the feet, can find 
any resemblance between the ancient metre and the modern. 

of speech will show that between longs and shorts there is, generally at least, a 
difference in quality as well as in time. Syllables long by position, indeed, re. 
quire more time for their utterance than ordinary short syllables, because they 
contain a greater number of successive articulations, but here, in modern ortho- 
epy, the length is a property of the syllable, not of the vowel alone. How far, 
and in what way, position actually modified the pronunciation of the vowel itself, 

n ancient prosody, cannot now be determined, and of course we do not know 
whether in that case prosodica.1 length belonged to the vowel, more or less, than 

n modern articulation. 



518 ANCIENT METRES. 

Indeed, what we imitate is not the origiial, but a figment 
which we have fabricated and set up in the place of it. 

Simmias of Rhodes, and other half-forgotten ancient 
triflers, wrote short pieces in verses of different lengths, ar- 
ranged in such succession that, when written down, the poem 
presented to the eye the form of an egg, an altar, a two- 
bladed battle-axe, or a pair of wings, and the likeness here 
was as real between the poem and the object, as it is between 
modern and ancient hexameters or Horatian metres. 

The frequent coincidence between Latin prosodical quan- 
tity and the Italian accent in the same words, and other 
points of apparent similarity in articulation, authorize the 
belief that in sound, these two languages resemble each other 
more nearly than any other pair of ancient and modern 
tongues, and of course, if ancient metres were capable of re- 
production anywhere, it should be in Italy. Nevertheless, 
the attempt has hardly been made, except by way of experi- 
ment, and then with no such results as to encourage repeti- 
tion.* What we call ancient metres have proved best adapt- 



* The Latin metres were fashioned upon, and borrowed from, those of the 
Greeks, and the copy may be supposed to have been, in its essential features, 
closely conformable to the original ; but it is a remarkable fact, that in the pro- 
nunciation of the two languages which now represent the Greek and the Latin, 
there is a difference that seems to point to a corresponding distinction in the or- 
thoepy of the ancient mother tongues. In Italian, not uniformly, certainly, but 
in the great majority of cases, the accent, or stress of voice, falls on the syllable 
which, in the corresponding Latin word, was prosodically long. In modern 
Greek, on the other hand, no such coincidence between the present accent and 
the ancient quantity exists, and the accentuation is absolutely independent of 
the ancient metrical value of the syllables in the same words. Hence, though 
modern Italian poetry has assumed a new character by the adoption of new 
metres, and especially by the fetters of rhyme, yet there is very possibly some 
resemblance between the rhythms of modern and ancient Roman bards, whereas 
modern Greek measures, which are accentual and not temporal, and the proso- 
dical movement of ancient Hellenic poetry seem to have nothing in common. 
The partial resemblance between the old Latin quantity and the new Italian ao 



ANCIENT METEES. £19 

ed to languages whose articulation differs most widely from 
that of the classic tongues, and the success of these metres 
has been in the inverse ratio of their actual resemblance to 
the prosody from which they have taken their names. The 
more explosive the accentuation, the more numerous the con- 
sonants, the less clear and pure the vowel, the more tolerable 
the modern travesty of the ancient metre ; and the hexameter 
has become naturalized in Germany, not because it is like, 
but because it is unlike, the classical verse whose name it 
bears, and therefore is suited to a language of a totally differ- 
ent orthoepical character.* The pentameter has also, but 
invitd Minerva, been introduced into German, and the use 
of this most disagreeable and unmelodious of measures has, 
for an un-Germanic ear at least, spoiled what would other- 
wise be some of the finest poems in all the literature.f 



^entuation is one of the circumstances that serve to explain why, even after the 
introduction of modern rhymes and modern measures into Latin poetry, the 
classical metres were also kept up in mediaeval Latin, and both systems of pros- 
ody employed concurrently. It is true, that even after the first appearance of 
the accentual, or as the most important early form of it is called, the political 
metre of modern Greek, hexameters and other verses constructed after the an- 
cient rules sometimes occur, but the co-existence of the two systems was much 
les3 general, and of briefer duration, in Greece than in Italy. 

* The greater proportion of unaccented syllables in German, renders that 
language better suited to the classical, and especially the dactylic, measures than 
the English. A literal translation from English into German occupies from a 
third to a fourth more space in letter-press in the latter than in the former. The 
number of words, from the resemblance between the two in syntactical move- 
ment, is about equal in a given period, and the accents do not differ much in 
frequency. The syllables in German contain, upon an average, more letters than 
in English, but the difference in this respect is not sufficient to account for the 
difference in the space occupied by the original, and by a version from one to 
the other. It is occasioned chiefly by the greater number of syllables in Ger- 
man, resulting from the greater proportion of augmentative inflections in its 
syntax. 

f The beauty of Schiller's Spaziergang, for instance, is sadly impaired by the 
halting movement of its verse, and the shock to the reader's nerves from the 



520 ANCIENT METRES. 

The poetic measures of the Anglo-Saxon and the Scandi- 
navian tongues are founded wholly on accentual rhythm, 
though the most ancient Gothic verses are by no means 
always capable of resolution into poetic feet. 

The Ormulum, in many respects one of the most interest- 
ing relics of Old-English poetic literature, is strictly metrical 
in its movement, and of great regularity in the structure of 

sudden earthward plunge which Pegasus makes at the end of every alternate 
line. If any thing were wanting to prove that ancient prosody could not have 
been accentual, sufficient evidence might be found in its admission of a metre 
which accentual scanning makes so repulsive. 

The recent experiments in the way of reviving the hexameter in English have 
certainly been much more successful than those of the sixteenth century, but I 
believe there is little disposition to attempt to resuscitate the pentameter in Eng- 
lish verse. It is surprising that so exquisite an ear as that of Spenser could con- 
tent itself with such rhythms as those of his essays in classical metre, and we can 
hardly think him serious in offering such lines as these as specimens : 

See yee the blindefolded pretie God, that feathered Archer, 
Of Loners Miseries which maketh his bloodie Game ? 

Wote ye why, his Moother with a Veale hath couered his face ? 
Trust me, least he my Looue happely chaunce to beholde. 

Spenser had as much difficulty in theory as in practice in reconciling accen- 
tual rhythm with classic quantity. " The accente," he says, in his letter to Har- 
vey in Haslewood's collection, "sometime gapeth, and as it were yawneth ill- 
favouredly, coming shorte of that it should, and sometime exceeding the measure 
of the Number, as in Carpenter, the middle sillable being vsed shorte in speache, 
when it shall be read long in verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling, that draweth 
one legge after hir : and Heauen, being vsed shorte as one sillable, when it is in 
verse, stretched out with a Diastole, is like a lame Dogge that holdes up one 
legge." 

Among all the various attempts to present an ancient poem to modern read- 
ers in a form supposed to be analogous to its ancient shape, I know of none 
where the success is more doubtful than in Newman's Homer. The " blind old 
man of Scio's rocky isle " is reported to have earned a precarious livelihood by 
chanting, on festive occasions, the ballads which Pisistratus long after collected 
and arranged in the form in which we now possess them, as a consecutive series 
of poems. Mr. Newman has attempted to give them, in an English version, a form 
corresponding to that in which they were originally composed and delivered. 
I am not disposed to question the spirit or fidelity of this translation, and upon 
European ears, which are, of course, less familiar than ours witn our naticnaj 



THE OKMULUM. 



521 



its verse. It resembles Latin poetry in adopting the prin« 
ciple of the elision of the final vowel when followed by a 



^erio-comic melody, the metre may not produce a ludicrous effect ; but to an 

American it has altogether the air of an attempt to set the Iliad to the tune of 

Yankee Doodle. The following are specimens: 

521 



1. Maiden Athene thereupon 

Courage bestow'd and enterprise, 
Might in pre-eminence be seen 
About his helmet and his shield 
In fashion of autumnal star, 
Blazeth abroad irradiant, 
Such fire around his head she then 
And urg'd him to the midmost ranks, 

2 Thick as the flakes of snow may fall 
When Jove the Counsellor is bent 
Snowing on mortals: mid the lull 
Until the lofty mountain-peaks 
And eke the lotus-beaving plains 
Yea, and along the hoary brine 
Save where the billows washing up 
Are all things over-wrapt, whene'er 

3. So with a loud crash down he dropt, 
His hair, that with the Graces vied, 
And ample tresses, which with gold 
As when in solitary dell, 
A man may kindly rear a shoot 
Dainty and all-luxuriant; 
From diverse-blowing winds ; and it 
But sudden cometh wind indeed, 
And from its own pit wrencheth it, 
Such then the ashen-speared son 
Beneath Atrides Menelas 



on Diomed Tydides 
that he mid all the Argives 
and earn excelling glory, 
unweary fire she kindled, 
which, when in ocean washed, 
beyond the host of heaven ; 
and down his shoulders kindled, 
where'er the rout was thickest. 

upon a day of winter, 
his weapons to exhibit, 
of winds he sheds it constant, 
and outmost knolls it cover, 
and the fat tilth of peasants ; 
the shores and creeks it lineth, 
repel it ; but beyond them 
the storm from Jove is heavy. 

and o'er him clang'd his armour, 
was now with gore besprinkled, 
and silver were embraided. 
where rife spring-water bubbleth, 
of easy -sprouting olive, 
and round it breezes rustle 
with a white flower buddeth: 
with plenteous weight of tempest, 
and on the earth out-layeth . 
of Panthoiis, — Euphorbus, — 
was slain and stript of armour. 



The metre of Mr. Newman's translation is indeed the same as that of the Or- 
mulum, which I shall have occasion to mention with praise. But it is constructed 
with much less prosodical skill ; and while the easy, familiar flow of this rhythm 
is well adapted to the simple Saxon dialect of Ormin, with its multitude of liquid 
and vowel endings, and to the prosaic style of his narrative and discussion, noth- 
ing can be more unsuited, either to the Latinized diction and heavy, consonantal 
English of our day, or to the majestic movement and luxuriant imagery of th« 
Homeric song. 



522 THE ORMULtJM. 

word beginning with a vowel or aspirate, and in rejecting 
rhyme and alliteration, while its rhythm is accentual, like that 
of all modern poetry. Waiving the difference between tem- 
poral and accentual rhythm, the versification of the Oram 
lum closely resembles some ancient metres, and is therefore 
assumed to have been borrowed from them. I shall not 
debate the question in this particular case, but I must pro- 
test against the theories which assume that the pattern of 
all that is modern in literature is to be found in something 
that is old. There is a school which traces all recent forms 
of European verse, rhyme itself included, to Latin classical or 
mediaeval poetry, all Latin metrical forms to Greek, all Greek 
poetic measures to Sanscrit, and here, fortunately, for want 
of a new literary continent beyond, the pedigree abruptly 
stops. Resemblance of form betweeen different languages, 
or their literary adaptations, may prove a community of na- 
ture in man, but not necessarily a historical descent of one 
from the other, or even a relationship between them. Re- 
currence is not always repetition, and it is not in the slightest 
degree improbable that like thoughts, images, poetic phrases 
and poetic measures should originate spontaneously in nations 
and ages that have nothing in common but their innate hu- 
manity. The pride of investigation must end somewhere, 
and we may as well admit ultimate facts in man as in brute 
nature. 

I will illustrate the prosody of the Ormulum by a mod 
ernization of the first twenty-two verses, in the same metre 
as the text, and I may observe that the original is so purely 
English in vocabulary and grammar that most of the words 
I employ are the same in form and syntactical arrangement 
as in the text : 



THE ORMULTJM. 523 

Now, brother Walter, brother mine, 

After the flesh's nature ; 
And brother mine in Christenty 

By baptism and believing ; 
And brother in the house of God 

Eke in another manner, 
In that we-two have taken up 

One priestly rule to follow, 
Both canons are in rank and life 

As holy Austin 'stablished ; 
I now have done e'en as thou badst, 

And thy desire fulfilled, 
For into English I have turned 

The Gospel's sacred teachings, 
According to the little gift 

Which God to me hath granted. 
Thou thoughtest that it might right weli 

Yield Christian souls much profit, 
If English folk, for love of Christ, 

Would faithfully it study, 
And follow it, and it fulfil, 

In thought, in word, in doing.* 

* Nu, broperr Wallterr, broperr min 

Affterr pe fiseshess kinde ; 
& broperr min i Crisstenndom 

purrh fulluhht & purrh trowwpe ; 
& broperr min i Godess hus, 

Yet o pe pride wise, 
purrh patt witt hafenn takenn ba 

An reghellboc to follghenn, 
Unnderr kanunnkess had & lif, 

Swa summ Sannt Awwstin sette ; 
Ice hafe don swa summ pu badd, 

& forpedd te pin wille, 
Ice hafe wennd inntill Ennglissh 

Goddspelless hallghe lare, 
Affterr patt little witt tatt me 

Min Drihhtin hafepp lenedd. 
bu pohhtest tatt itt mihhte wel 

Till mikell frame turrnenn, 
f iff Ennglissh follk, forr lufe off Crist, 

Jtt wollde yerne lernenn, 
k follghenn itt, and fillenn itt 

Wipp pohht, wipp word, wipp dede. 

f"or want of the proper type I am obliged to use in this extrsrt, as well ai 



524 THE ORMULUM. 

The metrical construction of this poem is so skilful, and 
its accentual rhythm so perfectly preserved, that though we 
are constantly expecting the rhyme, we scarcely observe that 
it is wanting, and it seems to me one of the most dex- 
terous compromises between the classical and modern pro- 
sodical systems which occur in the early poetry of any recent 
literature. There exists but a single manuscript, a mutilated 
fragment, of this remarkable poem, and there is strong reason 
to suppose that this is from the hand of the author himself. 
The lines are written continuously, like prose, but they are 
so marked by points as to show that they consist of fifteen 
syllables divided by a pause after the eighth, the first hemi- 
stich containing four iambic feet, the latter two iambics and 
an amphibrach. Theoretically, we may consider the prosody 
of the Ormulum as composed of verses of six iambics and an 
amphibrach, thus : 

And follow it and it fulfil | in thought, in word, in doing ; 

or of couplets consisting alternately of eight and seven sylla- 
bled lines divided into feet, like the hemistichs of the long 
lines, thus : 

In that we-two have taken up 
One priestly rule to follow. 

Upon the former view, the versification would be closely as- 
similated to that of many Latin poems of the middle ages, as 
well as to certain still earlier poetic forms, and the want of 
rhymes and of alliteration favors this theory. By the latter 
division, it would nearly resemble metres very extensively 
diffused through all modern literature, and then the differ- 
in that in Lecture xix., sometimes y and sometimes </, when the original employs 
a Saxon chai acter. 



NEW POETIC FORMS. 525 

ence in the length of the lines, and the alternate single 
and double endings, would be very noticeable and important 
particulars. 

The Ormulum was probably never put in circulation. 
The author hints that he was subject to, the persecutions to 
which all who attempted to clothe the mysteries of religion in 
the vulgar tongue were exposed during the sway of the Homish 
church, and the mutilated condition of the manuscript may 
perhaps be ascribed to ecclesiastical hostility. Although, 
therefore, there were other early English poems in forms par- 
taking of the characteristics of both ancient and modern 
prosody, we cannot ascribe to the Ormulum any influence 
upon the structure of later English verse, and it stands as a 
unique example of greater skill in versification than had yet 
been attained in the Anglican tongue. 

The poets of the present day are striving to invent new 
forms and combinations, to emancipate themselves from some 
of the conventional restraints of verse, to loosen the fetters 
which they cannot wholly throw off, and to infuse fresh life 
and spirit into movements of the muses which perpetual rep- 
etition has made wearisome and ungraceful. As the ballet- 
master has revived the dances of the chivalric ages, and bor- 
rowed from rural districts and distant provinces complicated 
figures, giddy whirls and bold saltations, so the bard has 
evoked from forgetfulness and obscurity antiquated forms, 
abrupt changes and quaint devices, sometimes, no doubt, to 
gi^e appropriate expression to an inspiration which finds no 
fit utterance in the moulds of stereotyped verse ; but not less 
frequently to hide poverty of thought beneath the ill-sorted 
coloring and dazzling glitter of a strange and gaudy raiment. 
It is for such reasons, good and bad, that recent poets have 



526 DOUBLE RHYMES. 

re-introduced double and tri-syllabic rhyme, whiih Lad be* 
come nearly obsolete, into serious verse, and thus denational- 
ized our poetry by employing an ornament for the most part 
foreign in both form and material. 

The use of double rhymes is not well suited to the Saxon 
constituent of our language, since the dropping of so many 
of the unaccented and less conspicuous inflections, for double 
rhymes seldom occur in words of Saxon origin, except in the 
past tense and participle of the weak verbs, and in the pres- 
ent participle with its disagreeable, unmelodious ending in -ing, 
Chaucer seems to affect monosyllabic rhymes in his verse, 
and indeed seldom employs double ones, unless we count as 
such words in e final, which perhaps we should do, for there 
is no doubt but this letter was sounded in Chaucer's time, as 
it is now in the cognate languages, and in French verse. In 
the reign of Elizabeth, the study of Spanish and Italian lit- 
erature led to the very frequent employment of polysyllabic 
rhymes ; and though not much used by Spenser, they con- 
tinued in fashion down to the era of the Restoration. At 
that period, French influence became predominant ; many, 
not only of the original characteristics of English literature, 
but of the forms of verse which English poets had borrowed 
from the bards of Southern Europe, disappeared for a time, 
and double rhymes ceased to be used in serious compositions, 
until the necessities of the present century revived them. 

French verse, indeed, not only admits but requires the 
alternate use of double rhymes, but as the last syllable in 
this case is only the obscure e, which is very faintly articu- 
lated, English poets felt that a monosyllabic rhyme, with its 
pause, was a nearer approximation to the French feminine 
rhyme, as it is called, than our few dissyllabic consonances, 



ACCENTUATION. 527 

which are much more generally spondees than trochees, could 
furnish. 

I have spoken of double and triple rhymes as foreign in 
form as well as material. It is true that many, perhaps most, 
of the words forming trisyllabic or dactylic, and dissyllabic 
or trochaic rhymes, existed in the language, and were em- 
ployed in poetry, long before the sixteenth century, but they 
were almost all borrowed from the French, and brought with 
them an accentuation which threw the stress of voice on the 
last syllable ; so that although now dactylic or trochaic in 
pronunciation, they originally furnished monosyllabic rhymes 
only. This position of the accent shows how, in Chaucer, 
motion and nation, company and chivalry, fellonie and jeal- 
ousie, abstinaunce and countenaunce, apparence and exist- 
ence, form perfect rhymes, as they do in French at the pres- 
ent day ; and how Spenser, who employs very few double 
endings, makes Tantalus, victorious and dolorous rhyme to 
each other. 

It is interesting to observe the gradual naturalization of 
the orthoepy of foreign words in the English tongue. Lan- 
guages of the class to which English belongs, inflect much 
by letter-change. This change takes place in the radical, 
which is usually found in the first syllable ; and as inflec- 
tions, of whatever character, must be distinctly pronounced 
and made conspicuous in order to mark the grammatical re- 
lations, the first syllable, or that in which the letter-change 
occurs, naturally receives the stress of voice. Hence, in all 
these languages, there is a tendency to throw the principal 
accent so far back as to reach the radical. The vocabulary 
of the French is derived, to a great extent, from Latin words 
deprived of their terminal inflections. The French adjec- 



528 ACCENTUATION. 

tives mortal and fatal are formed from the Latin mor 
talis and fatal is by dropping the inflected syllable; the 
French nouns nation and condition from the Latin ab- 
latives natione, conditione, by rejecting the e final. 
In most cases, the last syllable retained in the French deriv- 
ative was prosodically long in the Latin original, and either 
because it was also accented, or because the slight accent 
which is perceivable in the French articulation represents 
temporal length, the stress of voice was laid on the final syl- 
lable of all these words. When we borrowed such words 
from the French, we took them with their native accentua- 
tion, and as accent is much stronger in English than in 
French, the final syllable was doubtless more forcibly enun- 
ciated in the former than in the latter language.* The intro- 
duction of these words was accordingly a disturbing element 
in Old-English orthoepy, and as the influence of this element 
was strengthened by the fact that many English words were 
inflected by the weak or augmentative method, and of course 
not accented on the first syllable, the whole accentual system 
of the language was deranged, and centuries elapsed before 
the radical principles of Gothic articulation recovered their 
ascendency. "Words were accented according to their ety- 
mology, not in conformity with the genius of the language, and 
there is even yet a conflict on this very point between the 
Saxon and the Komance ingredients of our mother-tongue. 
In Chaucer's time, the words I have quoted from him were 

* Although prosodical accent is essentially a more important feature in English 
than in French orthoepy, and therefore was always more conspicuously marked in 
the former, yet the difference in this respect does not appear to have been as great 
between the two languages three hundred years ago as at present. This is evident 
from the care and minuteness with which Palsgrave discusses a subject almost 
wholly overlooked in modern French grammars, as well as from other evidence. 



ACCENT IN SIXTEENTH CENTTTRY. 529 

all accented on the last syllable ; motion, nation ; company, 
chivalry ; countenaunce, abstinaunce, and this accentuation 
continued without much change until the middle of the six- 
teenth century. Koger Ascham, the classical tutor of the 
Princess, afterwards Queen Elizabeth, much commends the 
following hexameter couplet by Mr. Thomas Watson, as be- 
iug " translated plainlie for the sense, and roundlie for the 
verse : " 

All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses, 

For that he knew many men's manners and saw many cities. 

These lines, pronounced with the modern English accentua- 
tion, are not hexameters, or indeed metre of any sort ; and 
we can scan them only by reading them thus : 

All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses, 

For that he knew many men's manners, and saw many cities.* 

The study of Italian literature, which became fashionable 
about this period, concurred with the inborn tendencies of 
English to revive the Saxon accentual system, for the Italian 
verbs, nouns and adjectives retain a final inflected syllable ; 
and though that syllable is distinctly articulated, the stress 
of voice never falls upon the ultima, except in a very few 
verbs and nouns which have lost the Latin inflectional end- 
ing, and in cases where, for metrical convenience, the final 
vowel has been dropped. 

In Sir Philip Sidney's time, the Gothic pronunciation 
was already so far restored, that our Gallicized Latin words 

* Harvey, in criticizing Spenser's accentuation, which seems to have been 
licentious enough, inquires whether he would pronounce travellers, and pro- 
ceeds thus: "Or will Segnior Immerito bycause, may happe, he hathe a fat- 
bellyed Archedeacon on his side, take vppon him to controll Maister Doctor 
Watson for his All travailers, in a verse so highly extolled of Master Ascham ? n 
— Haslewcod, II., 279. 
34 



530 ACCENT IN SIXTEENTH CENTUEY. 

had taken a princi} al accent at or near the beginning ; but 
they still retained a secondary accent at or near the end of 
the word, and accordingly, while Chancer made such words 
as nation, station, iambuses, or dissyllables with the accent 
on the last syllable, they had in Sidney's age become dacty- 
lic trisyllables. This is shown not only by the use which 
Sidney makes of them in poetry, but we have his express 
authority for the fact ; for in his Defense of Poesie, after men- 
tioning the masculine and feminine rhymes of the French 
in one and two syllables, respectively, and the sdrucciolo 
of the Italians, or dactyl, in three, he adds : " The English 
hath all three ; as do, true, [masculine ;] father, rather, 
[feminine or trochaic;] and motion, potion" [sdrucciolo 
or dactylic] In like manner, Puttenham says that remune- 
ration makes two good dactyls, contribution a spondee and 
dactyl. It is clear, therefore, from this and much other con- 
current testimony, that in the sixteenth century, mo-ti(shi)-on, 
po-ti(shi)-on, were pronounced trisyllabically, with a faint 
secondary accent on the last syllable ; whereas at present the 
vowel of the final is obscurely articulated, the ultima and 
penultima have coalesced, and the words are dissyllabic and 
trochaic, or, at the end of a verse, spondaic. Spenser, in his 
Sonnet on Scanderbeg, makes pyramids and heroes amphi- 
brachs, pyramids, heroes. Ben Jonson accents constitute and 
liquefy on the last syllable.* Milton, in II Penseroso, rhymes 
throne and contemplation / in the Hymn on the Nativity, 
began and ocean, alone and union, session and throne, un- 

* In Gil's Phonographic Spelling, y and ies final are made long, as, destinj, 
viciorjz, finalj, enemj, hevnlj, ivorj, skurilitj, incivilitj, miserjz, komoditj, 
which affords a strong presumption that these syllables received at least a distinct 
gei ordarj accent. 



CHANGE OF ACCENT. 531 

sufferable and council-table, stable and service^*?,* and in 
the Passion, tears and charac^rs. So in Paradise Lost, he 
accents adverse, aspect, converse, access, process, impulse, 
pretext, surface, contrite, product, prescript, and, even when 
employed as nouns, consult, insult, contest. In trisyllables, 
blasphemous, crystalline, remediless, triumphed, maritime, 
connagrant. Some of these, such as accenting contempla- 
tion and session on the final syllable, are doubtless mere 
poetic licenses ; for Ben Jonson in his English Grammar says 
that nouns ending in -tion and -sion, are accented on the an- 
tepenultima, and he instances condition and infusion, both 
of which he treats as words oi four syllables. But the great 
frequency of ultimate and penultimate accentuation, by Mil- 
ton, of words in which the stress of voice is now thrown 
further back, shows that the pronunciation of the seventeenth 
more closely resembled that of the sixteenth and earlier cen- 
turies than of the nineteenth. 

Landor, to whom I am indebted for some of my exen pli- 
fications from Milton, notices the superior poetic force of the 
Miltonic accentuation ; and he cites uproar as being a liner 
and much more striking word than our modern uproar, a pro- 
nunciation which only serves to suggest a false etymology, 
uproar being not a compound of up and roar, but merely the 
English form of the cognate German Aufruhr. Landor 
believes Wordsworth to have been instrumental in promoting 
the modern disposition to carry back the accent, but I think 
he overrates Wordsworth's influence in this respect. The 



* Puttenham (Haslewood, I., 87) says, "Sometimes it sounds better to say 
revocable than revocable, recoverable than recoverable." This shows that the 
accent in this termination was fluctuating, and that in revocable, it had not yet 
been carried farther back than the antepenult. 



532 CHANGE OF ACCENT. 

tendency to this general change manifestel itself a century 
before the time of that poet, nor have his writings ever be. 
come sufficiently popular to have awakened it, had it been 
dormant. The same critic mentions aristocrat, concordance, 
contrary, industry, inimical, contemplate, conculcate, detail, 
^.Zexander, sonorous, snMunary, desultory, peremptory, as 
words which have in very recent times transferred the accent 
to the initial syllable.* This list might have been very much 
enlarged, but the changes indicated by Landor have not all 
become established in this country, and some of them are to 
be regretted, because they tend to obscure the etymology and 
classical quantity of the words where they occur. 

There are, on the other hand, cases where the change of 
accent has brought back a word to its proper form. A strik- 
ing instance of this sort occurs in the word hospital. This 
was formerly accented on the second syllable, hospital, and 
in popular speech, and at last in writing, the initial ho was 
dropped and the word become spital, and was so spelt both 
in poetry and prose. This accentuation has so disguised the 
word that Landor believes even Ben Jonson to have been ig- 
norant of its etymology, though the passage he cites from 
Jonson by no means sustains the opinion. The strong accen- 
tuation which characterizes the English articulation makes 
us so sensible to that element of speech that we habitually 
conceive of it as a significant element of itself, and no mis- 
pronunciation of English by foreigners so effectually con- 
founds us as the transposition of an accent. It has with us 



* Smart, writing in 1836, observes, that the accent in balcony has shifted 

from the second to the first syllable, within twenty years. Rogers complained 

of this displacement of accent, and said, "contemplate is bad enough, bul 
balcony makes me sick." 



PROSODY OF GOTHIC LANGUAGES. 533 

taken the place both of ancient quantity, and of the subtilty 
in the discrimination of the quality of vowels, which belongs 
to the cognate tongues. An anecdote current at our national 
metropolis will illustrate the importance which persons of 
nice ear habitually give to accentuation. There were, a few 
years since, two Senators from the South-west, one of whom 
pronounced the name of the State they represented Arkan- 
sas, the other Ar'kansas, both of them making the accented 
syllable so emphatic, as to leave the rest of the word almost 
inaudible. The accomplished officer who then presided in 
the Senate, in recognizing the Senators in question as they 
rose to speak, adopted their own accentuation, and always an- 
nounced one of them as " the Senator from Ar'kansas," the 
other as " the Senator from Arkansas." 

There are, indeed, examples of a transposition of the ac- 
cent in the contrary direction. The Latin disciple is a case 
in point. It was formerly accented on the first syllable, dis- 
ciple, and in conformity with this accentuation, it was some- 
times spelt disple ; but the instances of this character are too 
few to be considered as any thing but exceptions to the well- 
established general tendency of the English speech. 

The inclination to throw back the accent, though less 
prevalent in this country, as I shall show hereafter, is carried 
to an extravagant length in England, and hence such dis- 
torted pronunciations as diocesan, Chry'sostom, which are 
not only without any etymological foundation, but in a high 
degree unmelodious and unrhythmical. 

The prosody of the Gothic languages, and of English 
more perhaps than any other, is much affected by the mono- 
syllabic form of so many of our most important words. The 
short words in the Romance tongues are, not always indeed, 



534 DOUBLE RHYMES. 

but very generally, particles or other words usually not em 
phatic, whereas, in English, monosyllables, especially if of 
Saxon origin, are very often the most emphatic words in a 
period. Besides this, the majority of our monosyllables end 
with a consonant, often with two, and as the following woi d 
in most cases begins with a consonant, monoysllabic words 
generally have, in spite of our insensibility to mere quantity, 
if not a technical prosodical length, at least an environment 
of consonantal sounds, which makes them rhythmically long 
in comparison with the unaccented syllables of longer 
words, and of course unfits them for elements of the dactylic 
measures. 

The frequency of double and triple rhymes in the works 
of Sidney and other admirers of Italian and Spanish poetry, 
contrasts remarkably with their comparative rarity in their 
cotemporary, Spenser, who, though influenced by romantic 
models in the plan of his story, followed native English pre- 
cedents, or forms long naturalized, in the structure of his 
verse. While Spenser very generally uses monosyllabic con- 
sonances, we find in Sidney such rhymes as, signify, dignify ; 
mutable, suitable ; notability, possibility ; carefulness, ware- 
fulness; delightfulness, rightfulness, sightfulness, spiteful- 
ness ; disdainfulness, painfulness ; besides many compound f 
ones, as hideaway, hideaway ; pleasure doth, treasure doth ; 
number not, cumber not ; framed is, blamed is ; and even 
among the few poetic licenses of Chaucer, we find this coup- 
let in the Sompnoures Tale : 

Refreshed more than in an hundred places, 

Sike lay the husbond man whos that the place *8.* 

* Gower has some singularly constructed double rhymes, which serve to 



DOUBLE RHYMES. 535 

The resuscitation of polysyllabic rhyme and its more fre- 
quent introduction into serious poetry, is partly the effect of 
our satiety with the endless repetition of particular mono- 
syllabic rhymes into which English poetry had run, and a 
consequent craving for novelty in sound, and partly to the 
attempts at a more strict conformity of translations to their 
original, which is a natural result of our increasing familiar- 
ity with foreign literatures. To say nothing of the almost 
exclusive employment of double rhymes in Italian, it will 
be remembered that in French poetry, the use of couplets 
with rhymes ending alternately monosyllabically and with 
the mute e, or what are called masculine and feminine 
rhymes, is obligatory ; and many German writers, not only 
needlessly, but very unwisely, as I think, have imposed upon 
themselves the same inconvenient rule. In making English 
versions of poems in those languages, where the metre of the 
original is retained, translators often endeavor to follow the 
rhymes of the text also, and the pedantic exactness with 
which this rule is adhered to, so far from producing an exact 
conformity, very often leads to a much wider disparity than 
would follow from the use of monosyllabic rhymes alone. The 
French mute or feminine e, which in poetry nearly corre- 
sponds to the German e final, scarcely has an equivalent in 
English orthoepy. Our short unaccented y final is much 

prove that the e final of words now monosyllabic was articulated in his time. 
On p. 282, VoL I., Pauli's edition, is this couplet : 



And, p. 370, 



To speke a goodly word unto me, 
For all the gold that is in Rome. 

So woll I nought, that any time 

Be lost of that thou hast do byme, (by rce.) 



There are several similar examples in Hoccleve. In La male Regie, he 
rhymes hye me with tyme, and ny me (njgb me) with pryme, tyme, and cryme. 



536 OBSCURE ENDINGS. 

more distinctly articulated, and the English sounds nearest 
to it are those of the common pronunciation of a final and 
unaccented in such words as America, China, and the ter 
minal er in father, and the like, where our very inaudible 
utterance of the r leaves almost nothing for the ear but the 
obscure vowel sound preceding it, which is closely analogous 
in quality, and very nearly equal in prosodical quantity, to 
the French and German e final. But these sounds are of so 
rare occurrence in English, that they by no means answer the 
demands of the translator, and he accordingly resorts to our 
antiquated verbal forms in -est or -eth, as lovest, loveth, and to 
the participial form in -ing, as loving. These syllabic aug ■ 
ments are very far from being the prosodical equivalents of 
the syllables they are forced to stand for, and in fact do less 
truly represent those syllables than a monosyllabic rhyme, 
with the usual pause, would do. To exemplify : In Goethe's 
magnificent Archangelic Trio in the Prologue to Faust, the 
alternate double rhymes are all in the unaccented e final, ex- 
cept in two instances, where the liquid n, which is almost as 
soft as the e alone, is made the termination. Yet in the best 
English translation, that of Mr. Brooks, these double rhymes 
are uniformly represented by active participles in -ing, except 
in one instance, where the translator finds a double rhyme in 
ocean, motion, and another where he employs the old third 
person singular of the verbs lendeth, comprehendeth. The 
poem in question contains twenty-eight lines, ten of which 
end in e obscure, four in the liquid n. In Mr. Brooks's trans- 
lation, otherwise admirable, ten of the corresponding lines of 
the version terminate with the active participle in -ing, one 
of the most unmelodious sounds of the language, and the 
Weise Reise, Starke Werke, schnelle Helle, of 
the original, where the final vowel constitutes the entire syl- 



0BSCUKE ENDINGS. 537 

>able, (tlie consonants belonging to the first syllable,) are rep- 
resented in English by sounding rounding, lending compre- 
hending, fleeting alternating, that is, syllables quantitatively 
short by syllables quantitatively long, which is in my judg- 
ment a wider departure from the prosody of the original than 
the employment of monosyllabic rhymes, with the inevitable 
pause after them, would have been.* 

The Latins used trochees for spondees at the end of hex- 
ameters, the pause at the close of the measure serving to 
lengthen the short final syllable ; but they apparently pre- 
ferred not to employ trochees ending in a vowel, unless the 
sense required or permitted a formal suspension of the voice ; 
and it will be found that most of the trochaic terminations 
of the Latin hexameters end in a consonant, or with a logical 
interruption in the syntax. The Greeks practised the same 
reserve, and helped the short vowel when practicable by the 

The unpleasant effect of the use of our few inflectional 
double rhymes is remarkably shown in Tennyson's Claribel, 
a poem of twenty-one lines, thirteen of which end in the old 
third person singular present indicative of the verb ; as lieth, 
sigheth, ooometh, hummeth, comet A, and so forth. This, of 
course, is not accidental, and habit makes this repetition of 
the lisping th tolerable to us / but what would be its effect 
on French or Italian ears, and what sounds would the unfor- 



* Although accent is the only recognized formal law of modern measure, 
yet, even independently of the arrangement of vowels and consonants which 
determines the melodious quality of verse, we cannot, with impunity, absolutely 
disregard the temporal quantity of words and their elements. Such words aa 
strength, shriek, writhe, or even such syllables as our participial terminations in 
ing, are not by nature, and cannot be made by art, the prosodical equivalents 
of endings formed by the obscure sound of the vowels with liquids, as in the last 
syllables of brid/s, father, stiffen. 



538 DOUBLE RHYMES. 

tunate foreigner produce who should attempt to read the 
poem aloud ? * 

That double rhymes will continue to be freely used in seri 
ous as well as in lighter English poetry, there is no doubt ; 
but, as we have few graceful and effective polysyllabic end- 
ings in words of Saxon etymology, the versifier will generally 
be forced to seek them in the Roman and Romance element 
of our speech, and thus the frequency of double rhymes tends 
to increase the proportion of Latin words in our poetic dialect. 
This is certainly a very serious evil, as it involves a sacri- 
fice of purity of diction, and of a genuine native vocabulary, 
to a morbidly fastidious ear, and a taste perverted if not de- 
praved by the study of foreign models, f 

* Mrs. Browning's poem, To L. E. L., referring to her monody on Mrs. 
Hemans, well illustrates the connection between double rhymes and inflectional 
endings. That poem contains thirty-two lines. All the rhymes are inflectional 
but one pair, and eighteen of them are participial endings in -ing. 

f Puttenham (Haslewood, I., 6*7) is severe upon Gower for helping himself 
to French rhymes when English would not serve his turn : 

" For a licentious maker is, in truth, but a bungler, and not a Poet. Such 
men were, in effect, the most part of all your old rimers, and specially Gower, 
who, to make up his rime, would, for the most part, write his terminant sillable 
with false orthographie, and many times not sticke to put in a plaine French 
word for an English ; and so, by your leave, do many of our common rimers at 
this day." 

Many of the French words which first appear in Chaucer were introduced 
for the sake of the rhyme, and not unfrequently taken as they stood in the 
poems which he translated or paraphrased; but there is almost as great a pre- 
dominance of French rhymes in his own original works. " The Squires Tale " 
has not been traced to any foreign source, and is believed to be of Chaucer's 
own invention, but of the six hundred and twenty-two lines of which that frag, 
ment consists, one hundred and eighty-seven end with Romance words, though 
the proportion of Anglo-Saxon words in the poem is more than ninety per cent. 

Mrs. Browning's " Cry of the Children " contains one hundred and sixty 
verses, with alternate double and single rhymes, and, of course, there are forty 
pairs of double rhymes, or eighty double-rhymed words. The proportion of 
Romance words in the whole poem is but eight per cent. ; but, of the eighty 
double-rhymed terminals, twenty-four, or thirty per cent., are Romance, so that 
neirly one-fourth of the one hundred Romance words introduced into the poem, 



SAXON ENDINGS. 539 

Poetry, by conforming foreign words to the native accen- 
tuation, has made some amends for the mischief it has done 
to the language by employing aliens as substitutes for 
worthier aboriginals. It may render a yet greater service by 
restoring graceful and melodious endings which a too power- 
ful Gallic influence has sacrificed. The existing want of 
double rhymes might be in part supplied by the revival of 
the Saxon inflections, many of which continued to be em- 
ployed down to the time of Spenser. "Why should we confine 
ourselves exclusively to our offensive ringing participial end- 
ing, and not rather say, sometimes at least, shinand, glitter- 
and, singand, for shining, glittering, singing? And why 
should we not now employ the old infinitive and plural in 
-en, as in these lines of Chaucer : 

For lack of answere, non of us shul dien, 

Al had ye seen a thing with bothe youre eyen. 

Ye shullen rather swiche a thing espien 
Than I, and wher me beste were to allien. 

With hertly will they sworen and assenten 
To all this thing, ther saide not o wight nay : 
Beseching him of grace, or that they wenten, 
That he would granten hem a certain day. 

It is remarkable that Thomson, who employs archaic 

are found in the double-rhymes ; while, of the eighty single-rhymed terminals, 
seventy are certainly Anglo-Saxon, and of the remaining ten, three or four are 
probably so. 

In the " Dead Pan," there are about one hundred double-rhymed endings, 
less than one-half of which are Anglo-Saxon ; and, in the "Lost Bower," out of 
about one hundred and fifty double rhymes, more than one-third are Romance. 

I have made this examination of Mrs. Browning's works, not as a criticism 
upon the diction of one of the very first English poets of this age, the first female 
poet of any age, but to show that even in the style of a great artist, of one who, 
by preference, employs native words wherever it is possible, a conformity to the 
rules of continental versification inevitably involves the introduction of an undue 
proportion of Romance words. 



54:0 THOMSON AND SHENSTONE. 

words and forms with such singularly happy effect in the 
Castle of Indolence, did not avail himself of this plural to 
vary his rhymes ; but in the whole of that most exquisite 
poem, there does not, I believe, occur a single polysyllabic 
rhyme, unless the coupling of lowers and powers with hours 
be so considered. These remarks apply with equal force to 
Shenstone's Schoolmistress, which owes much of its attrac- 
tion to its archaisms. The only approach to a double rhyme 
in the whole poem is in the use of the same consonances as 
those cited from the Castle of Indolence. It is still more 
extraordinary that Spenser, with his boldness in the employ- 
ment of antiquated and abnormal inflections, should so sel- 
dom have resorted to a form of so great metrical convenience, 
and at the same time so melodious in articulation, as this old 
plural, the decay of which is perhaps the greatest loss that 
English has sustained in the mechanism of verse. 

The English language cannot long supply the necessities 
of poetry without the introduction of new elements of verse. 
The ancient temporal metres were inexhaustible, because the 
permutations and combinations of the prosodical feet were 
infinite ; but when we establish the rule that in every coup- 
let there shall be two words which resemble each other not 
only in prosodical or in accentual length, but in their vowel and 
consonantal elements also, we introduce into verse an ingre- 
dient, the supply of which is limited. There are, as was ob- 
served in the last lecture, thousands of good poetic words 
which have n ) rhymes, others which have at most but a single 
one ; and of the rhyming words, thousands again are unsuited 
to metrical purposes. Hence rhyme tends to reduce our 
available poetical vocabulary to a much narrower list than 
that of other languages not more copious, but which have 
not adopted the fetters of rhyme. We must enlarge our stock 



WANT OF RHYMES. 541 

by the revival of obsolete words and inflections from native 
sources, or by borrowing from the Eomance languages ; or 
again, we must introduce the substitutes to which I have be- 
fore alluded, and which will form the subject of the next 
lecture. 



LECTURE XXV. 

ALLITERATION, LINE-RHYME, AND ASSONANCE. 

The interest which the study of native English, old and 
new, and of the sister dialects, now so generally excites, 
prompts the inquiry whether it be not possible to revive some 
of the forgotten characteristics of ancient Anglican poetry, 
and thus to aid the efforts of our literature to throw off or 
lighten the conventional shackles which classical and Ro- 
mance authority has imposed upon it. I propose to illustrate, 
by specimens original and imitative, the leading peculiarities 
of Anglo-Saxon and Old-Northern verse, as well as of one or 
two Romance metrical forms hitherto little if at all attempted 
m English, and to suggest experiment upon the introduction 
of some of them into English poetry. The only coincidences 
of sound known to English versification are, repetition of the 
same accentual feet in the same order, alliteration and termi- 
nal rhyme ; but these by no means exhaust the list of possible 
consonances, or even of those employed by some branches 
of the Gothic family. The poetry of the Anglo-Saxons was 
always rhythmical, but not always metrical. In modern 
criticism, rhythm is often loosely used as synonymous with 
metre, but they are properly distinguished. Bede speaks of 



RHYTHM AND METRE. 543 

tlie poetry of his native land as characterized by rhythm, and 
he thus discriminates between rhythm and metre : 

" It (rhythmns) is a modulated composition of words, not 
according to the laws of metre, bnt adapted in the number 
of its syllables to the judgment of the ear, as are the verses 
of our vulgar (or native) poets." 

" Metre is an artificial rule with modulation ; rhythmus 
is the modulation without the rule. For the most part you 
find, by a sort of chance, some rule in rhythm ; yet this is 
not from an artificial government of the syllables, but be- 
cause the sound and modulation lead to it. The vulgar poets 
affect this rustically ; the skilful attain it by their skill." * 

Bede's definition of rhythm is not remarkable for clear- 
ness and precision. Indeed, it is difficult to define rhythm, 
for the same reason that it is difficult to describe a sound, and 
the embarrassment has been increased by the determination 
of critics to insist on finding rhythms where none exist. In 
all simply rhythmical poetry, there will occur lines which 
are, to all intents and purposes, mere prose, just as in metri- 
cal poetry we now and then meet lines which, by poetic 
license, violate the established canons of metre. In a general 
way, we may say that accent is to rhythm what the foot is to 
metre, and we may illustrate the prosodical value of the ac- 
cent by comparing a rhythmical verse to a musical measure, 
where the number of accents is constant, though that of the 
notes is variable, just as is that of the syllables in rhythmical 
poetry. The only difference is that the laws of music are 
more strictly observed than those of rhythm, in which there 
is great license, both as to the number and the position of the 
accents. 

* Sharon Turner, Hist. Ang. Sax., B. ix., chap. 1. 



544 ALLITERATION. 

Metre may be defined to be a succession of poetical feet 
arranged in regular order, according to certain types recog- 
nized as standards, in verses of a determinate length. 

The following lines, from the Primus Passus of Piers 
Ploughman's Yision, are rhythmical but not metrical, and 
they conform to the Saxon models in all respects, except that 
the short, or unaccented, syllables are generally more numer- 
ous than in Anglo-Saxon verse, the particles being often omit- 
ted in the poetry of that nation : 

" What this mountaigne bymeneth, 
And the merke dale, 
And the feld ful of folk, 
I shal yow faire shewe. 

A lovely lady of leere, 
In lynnen y-clothed, 
Came doun from a castel 
And called me faire, 
And seide, " Sone, slepestow ? 
Sestow this peple, 
How bisie thei ben 
Alle aboute the maze ? 
The mooste parte of this peple 
That passeth on this erthe, 
Have thei worship in this world, 
Thei wilne no bettre ; 
Of oother hevene than here 
Hold thei no tale." 

Metre, therefore, was not an essential constituent of An- 
glo-Saxon verse, and the few instances of its occurrence are 
chiefly accidental coincidences, although a Saxon bard may 
occasionally have employed it designedly, just as a modern 
poet may confine himself to double rhymes, or introduce 
alliteration. Of rhymed poetry there are a few examples, as 
well as of what is called line-rhyme, but, in general, like 
endings seem to have been avoided rather than sought for. 
An English ear, then, would recognize in Anglo-Saxon verse 



ALLITERATION. 545 

none of the formal characteristics of poetry, and it would 
strike a modern hearer as merely an unmeasured and irreg- 
ular recitative. 

The most prominent formal feature of Anglo-Saxon versi- 
fication is its regular alliteration ; and, with certain excep- 
tions and licenses not necessary to be noticed at present, this 
was an indispensable characteristic of the poetry of that lan- 
guage, as well as generally of the Old-Northern or Icelandic. 

It was also much employed in Old-English, but whether 
its use was confined to certain districts or local dialects, or 
what were the circumstances that determined its application, 
is not, I believe, yet ascertained. The Ormulum, which is 
not alliterative, has been supposed to have been written by a 
native of the North of England, because its dialect is marked 
by Scandinavianisms, probably derived from the Danish pop- 
ulation of the border counties, and we should therefore ex- 
pect that its versification, as well as its diction, would exhibit 
traces of the influence of Scandinavian models ; but of this 
there are no indications. There is also a passage in Chaucer, 
now a regular stock quotation in all essays on this subject, 
which seems to show that the bards of other English coun- 
ties, most remote from the Danish colonies, did not employ 
alliteration or even rhyme. The narrator in the Prologue to 
the Persones Tale, says : 

But trusteth well, I am a sotherne man, 

I cannot sjeste, rom, ram, ruf, by my letter, 

And, God wote, rime hold I but little be f *er. 

Tli ere are many passages in other early English writers, 
which point to a marked difference between the poetic forma 
of Northern and Southern England ; and the general infer- 
ence would be, that the versification of the South conformed 

to classical and Komance, that of the North to A agio Saxon 
35 



546 ALLITERATION. 

and Scandinavian models. I do not discover sufficient evi- 
dence that, at any time after Norman English was recognized 
as an independent speech, distinct from both its sources, allit- 
eration was generally regarded as a regular and obligatory 
constituent of English verse, though it was freely employed 
as an ornament by individual writers in the fourteenth, and 
even fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. However this may be, 
metre and rhyme, perhaps as much from the splendid success 
of Chaucer as from any other cause, became established 
characteristics of versification, before the commencement of the 
fifteenth century ; and Piers Ploughman is the last work of 
any real importance in English literary history, which fol- 
lows the original type of Anglican verse. 

The rule which governed the employment of alliteration, 
stated in its most general form, and without specifying the 
exceptions and qualifications that under different circum- 
stances attended it, is, that in each couplet three emphatic 
words, (or, by poetic license, accented syllables,) two in the 
first line, and one in the second, must commence with the 
same consonant, or with vowels, in which latter case the 
initial letters might be, and generally were, different. The 
position of the alliterated words in the first line was arbi- 
trary, and varied according to the convenience of the poet, but 
the alliteration in the second line should fall on the first em- 
phatic word. Nevertheless, the lines were so short that the 
stress of voice would seldom fall on more than two syllables 
in either line, so that in practice, the first of these syllables 
would almost necessarily be alliterated in the first line also. 

The lines already quoted, for another purpose, from one 
of the interesting poems just referred to, The Yision and the 
Creed of Piers Ploughman, the former by Langland, one of the 
Eeformers before the Eeformation, probably soon after the 



ALLITERATION. 541 

middle of the fourteenth, century, are alliterated according 
to these rules, as are also the following extracts, though with 
frequent departures from strict conformity to them : 

91 Pilgrymes and palmeres 
Plighten hem togidere, 
For to seken seint Jame, 
And seintes at Rome. 
They wenten forth in hire wey, 
With many wise tales, 
And hadden leve to /yen 
Al hire /if after. 

4293 Kynde wit wol&e 

That each a wight wroghte, 
Or in eftkynge or in cfelvynge, 
Or travaillynge in preieres ; 
Contemplatif lif or actif lif 
Crist would thei wroghte. 

4347 For ???urthereris are manye leches, 
Lord hem amende ! 

They do men deye thorugh hir drynkes, 
Er cfestynee it wolde. 

5655 Thilke that God gyveth moost 
Leest £rood thei deleth ; 
And moost un-&ynde to the commune 
That moost catel weldeth. 

6897 Any science under sonne, 
The sevene artz and alle, 
But thei ben /erned for our Zordes love, 
iost is all the tyme. 

Tlie following are examples of alliteration upon a vowel : 

8597 And inobedient to ben ?/ndernome 
Of any lif iyvynge. 

8609 With in wit and with outwit 
yinagynen and studie. 



548 ALLITERATION. 

But though no longer entitled to rank as an organic ele- 
ment in English prosody, alliteration was often employed for 
two centuries later, not only by the inferior rhymesters to 
whom I have alluded, but by some of the brightest orna- 
ments of English literature. Ascham, with all his contempt 
for rhyme, did not disdain alliteration, and his Elegy on John 
Whitney is full of it, though few of the verses go quite so far 
as this : 

Therefore, my heart, cease sighes and sobbes, cease sorrowe's seede to sow. 

Spenser uses it profusely, and sometimes with very happy 
effect, but not always judiciously. The following lines are 
from the Faerie Queene : 

The knight was nothing nice where was no need. 

But direful deadly black, both leaf and bloom, 
Fit to adorn the dead and deck the dreary tomb. 

And /ills with /lowers /air flora's painted lap. 

I/ollow here the/ooting of thy/eet. 

He giveth comfort to her courage cold. 

Now smiling smoothly like the summer's day. 

Thy mantle marred wherein thou maskedst late. 

The alliteration is even more marked in these lines from 
Februarie in the Shepheards Calender, two of which have 
been already cited for another purpose : 

But home Mm Aasted with furious Aeate, 
Encreasing his wrath with many a threate ; 
//"is Aarmefull Aatchet he Aent in Aand ; 

and in this, from Mother Hubberds Tale : 

232 Gay without #ood is #ood heart's greatest loathing. 

So, T. Heywood, very melodiously, in the Hierarchie : 

To wail the wants that wait upon the Muse. 



ALLITEEATION. 549 

Sidney, on the other hand, seldom introduces alliteration. 
In the Arcadia he censures those who " course a letter, as if 
they were bound to follow the method of a dictionarie ; '' 
and in the fifteenth sonnet in Astrophel and Stella, he treats 
it as an evidence of poverty of genius : 

You that do Dictionaries method bring 

Into your rimes, running in rattling rows, 

****** 

You take wrong waies ; those far-fet helps be such 

As do bewray a want of inward touch. 

Shakespeare occasionally ridicules the use, or rather abuse 
of alliteration. Thus, in a couplet in the prologue to the 
interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe in the Midsummer Night's 
Dream, we have this couplet : 

Whereat with 61ade, with Sloody blameful Made, 
He 6ravely broached his Soiling 61oody Jreast. 

And in Love's Labour's Lost, Holof ernes says : "I will some- 
thing affect the letter, for it argues facility : 

" The praiseful princess pierced and pricked a pretty pleasing pricket." 

Milton, and the classic school of poets generally, avoid 
alliteration altogether; and so completely was it banished 
from English measures during most of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, that its former existence as an element of versification 
was forgotten. One of Waller's critical biographers says : 
" That wa}^ of using the same initial letters in a line, which 
throws the verse off more easily, as — 

" When man on many multiplied his kind, 

was first introduced by him ; as in this verse : 

" Oh, how I Zong my tender ftmbs to Jay ! " 

Dryden revived the use of alliteration, but there was long a 



550 ALLITERATION. 

certain fastidiousness with respect to its employment. It 
has, however, been gradually winning its way again to favor, 
and a great modern poet has not scrupled to write — 

"He rushed into the/ield, and,/oremost/ighting,/ell." 

Alliteration was wholly unsuited to the metrical system 
of the ancients, which rejected all echoing of sound, and its 
accidental occurrence was regarded as a rhetorical blem- 
ish. But it, nevertheless, often passed unnoticed by ears 
keenly sensible only to the prosodical quantity and musical 
intonation of words, and examples of the frequent, though 
doubtless undesigned, repetition of an initial consonant in the 
same verse or period, occur in the most fastidious of the 
classic writers. Tims, Cicero, in De Officiis, has this phrase : 

&en.sim sine sensu setas senescit ; 

and minor critics, who, happily for scholars devoted to graver 
pursuits, can find leisure for the chase of such small deer, 
have collected many examples of the like kind in other great 
authors of ancient Greece and Eome. 

Although specially characteristic of Gothic poetry, allit- 
eration has been by no means confined to it. It is employed 
by the Finlanders, and by several of the Oriental nations, 
and after the revival of literature, it found its way into the 
humorous Latin verses of the sixteenth century. The struc- 
ture of Latin, in which particles and pronouns may often be 
omitted, facilitates alliteration, however distasteful to classic 
ears. There are many modern Latin poems in alliterative 
verse, and the best known of these, the Pugna Porcorum, or 
Battle of the Pigs, in which every word begins with the let- 
ter p, extends to several hundred verses. 

Analogous to purely alliterative poems, or rather theii 



ALLITERATION. 553 

converse, are what are called lipogrammatic compositions. 
In these, a particular letter or letters are excluded, and ay 
ancient poetaster made himself notorious by a paraphrase of 
the entire Iliad, which rejected alpha or a, from the first book, 
leta or h from the second, and so of the rest. Lipogramma- 
tism does not affect the rhythm or metre of verse, and so 
poor a conceit would not deserve to be noticed, had not dis- 
tinguished authors occasionally practised it. Lope de Vega 
condescended to this trifling, by writing a novel in which the 
letters a and I were not employed. Yriarte was guilty of 
a similar folly, and there have been some later pieces in the 
same absurd style. 

To us, who have no ear for quantitative prosody, allitera- 
tion, provided it does not obtrude itself as an affectation, is 
generally agreeable, and besides the sensuous pleasure it 
gives us, it has often, and in earlier stages of the Gothic dia- 
lects, had still more frequently, a real significance. The in- 
separable particles used as prefixes were much less freely em- 
ployed in those languages than in Greek and Latin, and the 
first syllable of words, which was also usually the accented 
one, generally contained the radical. Now, particular com- 
binations of consonants are found to occur very frequently in 
vocables of the same primitive signification, and therefore, of 
a given number of words, in any homogeneous language, be- 
ginning with the same consonant, or combination of conso- 
nants, the majority will probably be more or less nearly allied 
in sense; and consequently, alliteration, or the use of 
prominent words with the same initial consonants, is a 
means of giving increased energy to a proposition, by a 
repetition of the emphatic radicals which enter into it. The 
pith of the alliterative proverbs so common among the Gothic 



552 ALLITERATION. 

races often lay partly in this iteration of meaning ; and a 
perception of the relation between cognate words, sometimes 
obscure, sometimes distinct, not unfrequently gives a keen 
pungency to idiomatic expressions. On the other hand, 
where from the changes of language, words originally allied 
have become distinguished or opposed in meaning, or where 
different words in a given proverb or phraseological combi- 
nation are derived from linguistic sources which ascribe a 
different signification to initial consonants, the verbal con- 
trast is much aided in effect by alliteration. 

Not only do our English proverbs often derive much of 
their point from this element, but many of our most favorite 
and most frequently quoted poetical sentiments and similes 
owe their currency to the same source. Few lines in English 
poetry are oftener repeated than Campbell's — 

Like angels' visits, few and far between. 

This simile Campbell borrowed, unconsciously perhaps, 
from an older author, and he ingeniously contrived at one 
blow to destroy the beauty of the thought, and yet make the 
verse immortal, by giving it a form that soothes the ear and 
runs glibly off the tongue. As is shown in Bartlett's Quo- 
tations, John Norris, about the close of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, had said — 

Like angels' visits, short and bright, 

and Blair, fifty years later, had improved the thought into — 

Visits, like those of angels, short and far between. 

The simile is here very beautiful and expressive. Campbell's 
version is a mere tautological repetition of the latter half of 
the thought. The adjective/kfljin the phrase " few and far 
between," of course refers to the number of visits, not of the 
visitors. If the visits are ' far between,' they must neces- 



ALLITERATION. 553 

Barily be 6 few ' with reference to any supposed period of 
time, and on the other hand, if they are ' few,' but yet con- 
tinued, as seems implied, through the whole earthly life of 
humanity, they can be paid only at long intervals. ' Few ' 
and ' far between ' are, then, equivalent ■ expressions, and the 
brevity of the visits, a circumstance very important to the 
completeness of the thought, is lost sight of by Campbell 
altogether. Yet Blair's exquisite simile is rarely quoted, 
while Campbell's feeble and diluted alliterative version of it 
is as hackneyed as the tritest proverb. So easily are we led 
by the ear. It is fair to admit that the epithets are more 
fitly applicable to the " hours of bliss," which form the sub 
ject of the couplet — 

What though my winged hours of bliss have been, 
Like angels' visits, few and far between : 

because ' few ' applied to c hours ' may be supposed to indi- 
cate a short continuance of time, which it cannot do when 
referred to ' visits ; ' but to make the simile truly descriptive, 
the qualifications expressed must belong both to the thing 
compared, and to that to which it is likened. 

Besides alliteration, some Gothic nations nearly allied to 
the Anglo-Saxon had its converse, namely the ending of 
words or accented syllables with the same consonant or coa- 
lescing consonants, the vowels being different, as, for exam- 
ple, in the words had led, find hand, sin rim. We have no 
name for this coincidence of sound, because it is not with us, 
or with any of the nations of central or southern Europe, a 
regular metrical element. It might very well be called con ■ 
sonance, but that word is already appropriated to express, 
generally, resemblance of sound, and, specially, full rhyme 
in both the vowel and the consonants which follow it. In 



554 LINE-RHYME. 

Icelandic poetry, this imperfect rhyme is regularly employed, 
and by the critics of that literature, is called skoth end- 
ing, a word of obscure etymology, which we may conve 
niently translate by half-rhyme. 

Although terminal rhyme is known to, and not unfre- 
quently employed by the Icelanders, their poetic consonance 
generally consists in what is called line-rhyme, in conjunction 
with an alliteration regulated as in Anglo-Saxon. In line- 
rhyme, the corresponding syllables occur, not at the end of 
successive lines, but in the same line. The rhymes are either 
of the character which I have described as half-rhyme, or 
like the perfect consonances of other languages, which latter 
form of rhyme the Icelanders call aflalhendfng. 

Line-rhyme is a constituent of all but the most ancient 
forms of Icelandic verse. Both line-rhyme and terminal 
rhyme occasionally occur in Anglo-Saxon poetry, though 
they are neither essential, nor, in the remains of that litera- 
ture which time has spared to us, frequent ; but from the close 
general analogy between the languages and the poetry of the 
Anglo-Saxons and the Northmen, and the mutual relations 
between those nations, it is not improbable that the Anglo- 
Saxons may sometimes have employed both forms of line- 
rhyme in a regular way, as the Icelanders always continued 
to do. 

The rule of construction of these consonances is that in 
each line there shall be two accented syllables which either 
form a perfect rhyme with each other, or which have the 
same final consonant or consonants with different vowels. 
The general distribution of the perfect and imperfect rhymes 
is, that the half, or consonantal rhyme, shall occur in the first 
line of the couplet, the full rhyme in the second. The first 
rhyming syllable may be at the beginning or in the middle 



ICELAJSTDIC VERSE. 555 

of the verse ; the second should fall on the penultimate. There 
are many metres in Icelandic verse, and some of them are 
discriminated only by logical, rhetorical or grammatical dis- 
tinctions. In the favorite metre, or what may be called the 
heroic, " that in which," as Snorri says, " most finished verse 
is composed," meo" £>eima hgetti er flest ort, |>at er 
7 a n d a t er, the lines consist of three trochaic feet or their 
equivalents, and are arranged in strophes of eight verses. 
The following imitation exhibits the application of these rules 
to English verse : 

Softly now are sifting 
/Snows on landscape frozen. 
Thick ly /all the /lake lets, 
Fe a t h ery -light, to g e t h er, 
/Shower of silver pouring, 
/Soundless, all around us, 
F i e 1 d and river /o 1 d ing 
.Fair in mantle rarest. 

Clad in garment cloud- wrought — 

Covered light above her, — 

(7a lm in cooling slumbers 

Cradled, Earth hath laid her, •. 

/So to rest in silence, 

>Safe from heats that chafe her, 

Till her troubled pulses 

Tt u er beat, and f e w er. 

F\erj throb is over — 
A 1 1 to stillness fa 1 1 en ! 
blowers upou her /ore head 
idling not yet, Spring-time I 
/Still yet stay awhile, too, 
/Sum mer fair, thy com ing ! 
Zinger yet still longer, 
Zest thou break her resting. 

Although the feet in which the line-rhymes occur are 
usually separated by intervening words, and arranged accord- 



556 ICELANDIC VERSIFICATION. 

ing to the rules just laid down, they are sometimes brought 
together at the beginning of the lines, as in the following 
verses : * 

JZoll, O rill, forever! 
R e s t not, lest thy wavelets, 
Sheen as sAining crystal, 
/SArink and sink to darkness! 
Wend with winding border 
Wi d e as i d e still turning, 
G r e e n o'erg r o w n with grasses, 
G ay as May with blossoms — 

To ward yon lowered castle, 
Time-and-rhym e-renowned. 
iigh tly let thy waves then 
L e a p the s t e e p y ledges, 
P o u r in p u r est silver 
Proudly, loudly over, 
.Dancing down with laughter, 
D a s h ing, flash ing onward, 

Ringing songs unending, 
/Sweet, replete with gladness. 
.Drape with dripping mosses 
D ell and fell o'erhanging; 
Xave with Jiving water 
Xowly growing sedges, 
T\\\ thy foil-worn current 
T'urneth, yearning, sea-ward. 

In another of the very numerous forms of Icelandic 

The following is the example of this metre given by Snorri. Hattatal, 



182:— 



Hilmir hjalma skurir 
herftir sverd"i roSnu, 
hrjota hvitir askar, 
hrynja brynja spangir ; 
hnykkja Hlakkar eldar 
harSa svarftar landi, 
remraa rimmu gloSir 
randa grand of jarli. 



ALLITERATION AND LINE-KHYME, 557 

poetry, the feet containing the full-rhyme are placed last in 
the verse, as in this imitation : * 

He a r the torrent h u r ry ! 
iZeadlong rashly dashing 
Z>own, in deafening thunder, 
Depths eye hath not fathomed! 
Mighty rocks uprooting, — 
.Rudely shattering, scattering 
.411 its own bright silver 
Into shape less v a p or. 

Stay, O/lood, that /liest 

i^ast toward night unsightly! 
PPa i t , ye waves, a 1 i t tie — 
TFisdom's s p e e c h would teach you ! 

Xight and /ife are sweeter, 

Zovelier fa r, than are the 

C\ o u d , the cold, the s h a d ow 
Closing round the boundless! 

Although line-rhyme might have been occasionally em- 
ployed with advantage in Anglo-Saxon verse, as I think it 
may still be in some departments of English poetry, yet it 
is fortunate for the interests of our old literature that it did 
not assume all the fetters of Scandinavian prosody. The 
Old-Northern mythologic poems, as those of the elder Edda, 
are much simpler in their structure than those of the latei 



* Snorri, Hattatal, 135, gives, in the following hemistrophe, an example of 
the form imitated in the text : — 

A'lmdrosar skylr isa 
ar flest megin bara sara ; 
kaenn lsetr hres a hronnum 
hjalmsvell jofurr gella fella; 

In another variation still, in addition to the half-rhyme of the first line, there 
'a a full rhyme in the third and fourth feet, thus : — 

Hraeljoma fellr hrimi, timi 

har vex of gram sara ara, 

frost nemr, of hlyn Hristar, Mistar 

herkaldan prom skjaldar aldar. 



558 ALLITERATION AND LINE-EHYME. 

Icelandic bards, and, like .Beowulf and the poems ascribed to 
Csedmon, they are usually without line-rhyme, and often with 
but a single alliterative syllable in the first verse of the coup- 
let. In point of poetic excellence, the simplest measures 
generally rank highest, while the excessively intricate and 
artificial forms of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have 
seldom any merit but that which belongs to the skilful exe- 
cution of nugce difficiles. A conformity to rules so difficult 
could be purchased only by the frequent sacrifice of the rhe- 
torical beauties of poetry, and the heroic rhymes of the Ice- 
landers are crowded with frigid conceits, and as inferior to 
the grand simplicity and the elevated inspiration of Anglo- 
Saxon poetry, as their narrative prose is superior to the com- 
paratively barren, unphilosophical, and even puerile histori- 
cal literature of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. 

There are also remarkable instances both of alliteration 
and of line-rhyme where we should least expect to find them, 
namely, in the literature of Italy and Greece. Take as an 
example of half-rhyme a stanza of ottava rima in the twenty- 
third canto of the Morgante Maggiore of Pulci : 

La casa cosa parea bretta e brutta, 
Vinta dal vento; e la natta e la notte 
Stilla le stelle, ch'a tetto era tutta. 
Del pane appena ne dette ta' dotte, 
Pere avea pure e qualche fratta frutta ; 
E svina e svena di botto una botte ; 
Poscia per pesci lasche prese a 1' esca ; 
Ma il letto allotta a la frasca fu fresca. 

The following sonnet in the Pisan dialect, from a note to 
the works of Eedi, abounds in full line-rhyme : 

Similemente . gente . criatura • 
La portatura . pnra • ed avenente • 
Faite plagente • mente per natura • 
Sicchen altura . cura • vola gente • 



ALLITERATION AND LINE-RHYME. 559 

Callor parvente . nente • altra figura • 
Non a fattura • dura • certamente • 
Pero neente • sente • di ventura . 
Chissua pintura . seusa • no prezente • 

Tanto doblata . data . ve bellessa 
E addoressa • messa • con plagensa • 
Cogna chei pensa . sensa • permirata • 

Pero amata • fatta . vunnaltessa • 
Che la fermessa . dessa conoscensa • 
In sua sentensa . bensa • onorata • 

Mullach, in his Grammatik der Griechischen Vulgar* 
sprache, cites several lines of alliterative line-rhyming Greek 
verse, from a hymn " by a Christian writer belonging to the 
school of the later Orphic poets," but without any indication 
of the probable date of the composition, which, however, 
cannot be by any means recent. The following are the first 
five verses : 

Xcupe K.6p"t\ xap''e<r<ro, x a P r t r ^ K ^ X&Pt 111 tok^wv, 

iraphev i<pr)fx.eptois ovpavtois tc <pi\t). 
Xalpe Kopi\ irdvTcav fieya x^-Pl*- - 1 ' 1 X^P/*" AajSovaa. 

Xa-PH-a- fteyaoftevewv X&PP - T ' o.<pavpoTepa>v, 
Xciipe irovwv re \vreipa, 56fiup fivreipd t* av6.Kr<av. 

The poem is referred to by Mullach for other purposes, and 
he makes no remarks upon the character of its versification. 
It is, however, like the Italian examples just cited, a mere 
jeu d'esprit, and there is not the slightest probability that 
the authors of any of them knew that they were introducing 
into their verses the characteristic features of a poetic literature 
so alien to that of Southern Europe as the songs of the Scan- 
dinavian bards. But they are the more interesting for that 
very reason, as instances of the spontaneous origination of 
similar poetic forms, in nations whose languages and whose 
literary culture have little or nothing in common. 



560 LINE-RHYME IN ENGLISH. 

Although half-rhyme may be said to be peculiar \.o Tee* 
landic poetry, if indeed it did not exist in Anglo-Saxon, yet 
there are examples of the employment of both full and im- 
perfect line-rhyme in modern English. The mere introduc- 
tion of a full rhyme in the middle of a verse, as when Cole- 
ridge says : 

And ice, mast-high, came floating 5y, 

is not a case in point, for this is only writing in one line what 
properly should be counted two ; but Byrons' verse — 

Lightly and brightly breaks away 
The morning from her mantle grey, 

is a true specimen of line-rhyme,, as is also Burns's line — 

Her look was like the morning star; 

look and like forming a half-rhyme. These and some of the 
many other similar examples, are probably accidental, but 
there are cases where we must suppose the introduction of 
such coincidences of sound to be intentional, though they 
have certainly never been regarded as regular constituents 
of any form of English verse.* 

In Longfellow's Miles Standish, containing about one 
thousand verses, there occur not less than forty instances of 
marked, as well as others of less conspicuous, line-rhyme. 
These may have been undesigned, but, with Mr. Longfellow's 
trained ear, and his familiarity with Old-Northern literature, 

* Among the verses prefixed to Sylvester's Du Bartas, 1611, there is a pyra- 
midal piece, with the heading, Lectoribus, which concludes with a couplet, coii« 
taining a quaint half-rhyme. 

Not daring meddle with Apelles table, 
This have I muddled^ as my Mvse was able. 



LINE-KHYME IN ENGLISH. 561 

I should rather suppose them purposely, or at least not un 
consciously, introduced into such lines as the following : 

Here in front you can see the very dint of the bullet ; 

Long at the window he stood and wistfully gazed on the landscape ; 

Washed with a cold gray mist, the vapory breath of the east wind, 
Forest and meadow and kill, and the steel-blue rim of the ocean. 

You are a writer, and I am a fighter, but here is a fellow 

Who could both write and fight, and in both was equally skilful. 

Sudden and loud as the sound of a soldier grounding his musket. 

In this last line, the alliteration is very observable, as also in 
the following : 

Steady, straightforward, and strong, with irresistible logic. 
Lying silent and sad in the afternoon shadows and sunshine. 
Jfusing a moment before them, Jlfiles Standish paused, as if doubtful. 

I think the introduction of these consonances a very hap- 
py feature in Mr. Longfellow's hexameters, and believe that 
a still more liberal use of them, especially of the line-rhyme, 
would facilitate the naturalization of a measure not easily 
reconcilable with English orthoepy. 

In spite of the excessive difficulty of the Icelandic versi- 
fication, and the limited number of perfect rhymes which the 
Old-Northern language affords, the bards of that nation 
seem to have been scarcely inferior to the modern Italians in 
facility of improvisation. The old sagas contain numerous 
examples of extemporaneous compositions, of elaborately 
complicated structure, but with a regular rhythmical flow ; 
and, indeed, most of the verses quoted in the sagas are im- 
provisations. This was rendered practicable only by almost 
36 



562 STRONG INFLECTIONS AND HALF-RHYMES. 

unbounded freedom of syntactical arrangement, and the ex 
tent to which the Old-Northern poets avail themselves of thia 
liberty, combined with the highly figurative style of theii 
diction, renders the interpretation of their chants a matter 
of no small difficulty to modern readers.* 

The use of half-rhymes in Scandinavian verse is neither 
an accident, nor the arbitrary adoption of a purely conven- 
tional form of poetical ornament, but it is a natural result of 
the Old-Northern system of inflections. In the Icelandic 
language, the strong inflections were prevalent in all classes 
of words which admit of declension or conjugation. The 
strong inflection consists, not uniformly, indeed, but usually, 
in varying words for case or tense, by changing the vowel of 
the radical syllable, leaving the consonants undisturbed ; and 
hence every verb or noun varied by this method, produces in 
its inflection half-rhymes. Thus, in English, bind makes in 
the preterite, bound, find found, run ran, sing sang, and in 
the participle sung / spring, sprang, sprung ; write, wrote, 
and in older forms both writ and wrate. So in nouns we 
have singular foot, plural feet, man plural men.f 

The frequent use of this mode of inflection could not fail 

* Haralds HarSraSa Saga, chapter 108, contains a sort of trial of skill in 
improvisation, in which King Harald, porgils, a disguised Norwegian warrior, 
and pjoSolfr, an eminent skald, all took part. The poetry, indeed, is far from 
being of a high order, but the incident is interesting, on account of a criticism 
of the king upon the versification of Thiodolf, who had coupled grom and 
skomm as a line-rhyme, that is, a syllable ending in a single, with a syllable 
ending in a double consonant ; too great a license for the nicety of an Old-North- 
ern ear. 

f In Icelandic, as in English, both forms of inflection exist, and are not un- 
frequently employed in the same word, but the strong declension and conjuga- 
tion are more prominent and marked in the articulation, and the letter-change 
often extends to more than one syllable, thus: nom. sing, harpari, a harper, 
becomes horpurum in the dative plural; nom. sing. masc. annarr, other, 
06 rum in the dative singular. 



ASSONANCE. 563 

to draw the attention especially to the vowels, the seizing of 
which was essential to the comprehension of propositions 
where words so inflected occurred, and the ear would conse- 
quently be rendered more acutely sensible to vowel-sounds, 
and would ascribe to them a greater relative weight in or- 
thoepy than belongs to them in other tongues, which, though 
the numerical proportions of their vowels and consonants may 
be the same as in the Gothic languages, are inflected by aug- 
mentation. Hence, the vowels might readily become metri- 
cal constituents of a character not less important than that 
which they possessed in the classic metres, and occupy as 
conspicuous a place in the prosody, as in the grammar of the 
language. 

It was natural that an element of articulation, syntacti- 
cally prominent, and just frequent enough in its occurrence 
to be agreeable and not wearisome, should have suggested 
itself as a convenient prosodical resource ; and it is a proof 
of the general truth of the doctrine I have advanced con- 
cerning the natural relation between inflections and prosody, 
that the few inflectional vowel-changes of the Greeks, such 
as the temporal augment, or the substitution of a prosodically 
long for a prosodically short vowel, as t) for e, o> for o, should 
have fallen in with their metrical system, just as strong inflec- 
tions did with that of the Scandinavian. 

I spoke of half-rhyme as the converse of alliteration. The 
literature of the Spanish Peninsula presents us with the re- 
verse of half-rhyme. I refer to assonance, an element of a 
much more subtle and etherial character than any constitu- 
ent of prosody which we have hitherto considered. Asso- 
nance consists in using the same vowel with different conso- 
nants. Thus, nice and might, war and fall, mate and shape, 
feel and need, are instances of assonance. This imperfect 



564: ASSONANCE. 

rhyme may be said to be peculiar to the versification of Spain 
and Portugal, though it has been employed in Germany by 
Frederick Schlegel in his tragedy, Alarcos, by Apel, in his 
Spectrebook, and by others in translations from Calderon, 
and other Spanish poets. The rule of assonance, disregarding 
certain exceptions not necessary here to be particularized, 
requires the repetition of the same vowels in the assonant 
words, from the last accented vowel inclusive. Thus, man 
and hat, nation and traitor ', penitent and reticence, are asso- 
nant couples of words of one, two and three syllables, re- 
spectively. 

To an unpractised ear, assonance is scarcely perceptible, 
and it is the more obscure because it is generally introduced 
only in alternate verses, or the second of each couplet, the 
first lines of the successive couplets having neither rhyme, 
nor any other correspondence of sound. In the following 
specimen, in order to render the assonance more conspicuous, 
it is employed in the first three lines of each stanza, the 
fourth being left blank, and it is made monosyllabic, instead 
of ending the line with a trochee, as is usual in Spanish 
verse : 

Let me choose, and I will dwell 
Where the sea, with sounding tread 
Climbeth, till his feathery crest 
Brush the mountain's feet. 

Let me choose, and on such shore 
Will I plant my lowly home, 
Where the unresting billows roll 
Cliffs eternal near. 

There, beneath transparent skies. 
Where the vine and olive thrive, 
Where the golden orange smiles — 
Listening to the wave, 



ASSONANCE. 565 

There how gladly would I sleep, 
Ocean's music in mine ear, 
Through the night of time, nor feel 
Weary till the day.* 

In a former lecture, I noticed the large proportion of Eo- 
mance words which Mrs. Browning employs in her double 
rhymes. Mrs. Browning always prefers the Saxon word, 
where choice is possible, and I ascribe to this preference her 
employment of assonant, or vowel-rhymes to an extent that 
a more timid poet would scarcely venture upon. 

Of about fifty couples of double rhymes in The Dead 
Pan, a dozen pair are assonants, as, know from, snow-storm/ 
honest, admonisht ; silence, islands ; glory, evermore thee; 

* By way of more exactly illustrating the Spanish assonance, I give a trans- 
lation of a few stanzas of a well-known Spanish ballad, in which the principal 
correspondence falls on the penultimate syllable of the verse. 

Passing was the Moorish monarch 
Through the city of Granada, 
From the portal of Elvira 
To the gate of Bivarambla. 
Woe is me, Alhama ! 

Letters came to say, Alhama 
By the Christians now was holden. 
On the ground he flung the letters, 
Slew the messenger that bore them. 
Woe is me, Alhama ! 

Straightway from his mule alighting, 
Then he leaps upon his charger, 
Up the Zacatin he gallops, 
Comes in haste to the Alhambra, 
Woe is me, Alhama ! 

Having entered the Alhambra, 
On the instant gave he orders 
That the trumpet should be sounded, 
And the silver-throated cornets. 
Woe is me, Alhama ! 

In the original, the same assonant vowel, a, is continued through the entire 
poem, but this, though very common, is not obligatory, and the vowel if 
varied in different stanzas of the translation. 



566 ANAMINATION. 

iron, inspiring. In the Mournful Mother we find show htm, 
flowing ; behold not, folded ; glory, before thee / psalm now, 
palm bough ; and in the Lost Bower, advances, branches; 
prized I, unadvised by / come there, summer / mine be, pine 
tree • for me, door-way. These are not all Saxon words, it is 
true, but in most instances one, if not both, of the corre- 
sponding words is native, and the admission of assonance in 
these would render the ear more indulgent in rhymes of for- 
eign extraction. The example of so high a poetic authority, 
in introducing assonance as a license, might well justify sys- 
tematic experiment upon its regular employment. 

German literature presents instances of what has been 
called annomination, a word certainly not very expressive 
of the character of the thing designated. Annomination 
consists in opposing to each other, at emphatic points in the 
verse or period, words of similar sound but different signifi- 
cation or use, as in this example from Tieck : 

Wenn ich still die Augen lenke, 
Auf die abendliche S t i 1 1 e, 
Und nur denke dass ich denke, 
Will nicht ruhen mir der Wille, 
Bis ich sie in Ruhe senke. 

Twilight stillness when I drink, 
And myself am gazing still, 
Thinking only that I think. 
Then will never rest my will 
Till to rest I bid it sink. 

If the English lines happen to remind the reader of Pope's 
Yerses by a Person of Quality, he may be assured that the 
insipidity is not the fault of the translator. Sidney has in- 
dulged in this conceit, in what Landor calls the best of hia 
poems, the eighth song in Astrophel and Stella : 

Now be still, yet still believe me ; 



EUPHUISM. 567 

and elsewhere he says : 

A plaining song plaine-singmg voyce requires. 

Spenser, too, in the Shepheards Calendar, Januarie, has 
these couplets : 

I love thilke Zasse, (alas ! why do I love ?) 
And am forlorne, (alas ! why am I lorne ?) 

And thou, unluckie Muse, that wontst to ease 

My musing minde, yet canst not when thou should. 

And in Mother Hubberds Tale : 

Nor ordinance so needfull, but that hee 
Would violate, though not with violence. 

A still better example occurs in the Author's Induction, to 
the Mirror for Magistrates, Hasle wood's edition I. 15. : 

And leaves began to leave the shady tree.* 

Hardly to be distinguished from annomination is the 
euphuism of Queen Elizabeth's age, which Scott's character 
of Sir Percie Shafton has made familiar to modern readers. 
Scott has rather caricatured the style of Lilly, from whose 
principal work this peculiarity of expression derives its name, 
and Shafton is more euphuistic than Lilly, the great euphuist 
himself. Sir Philip Sidney uses it as frequently, perhaps, 

* Some of these examples remind us of a form of Icelandic verse, several 
varieties of which are described in the Hattatal of Snorri, under the name of 
refhvorf. Its peculiarity consists in the introduction of pairs of words oppo- 
Bite in meaning, such as hot, cold ; fire, water ; earth, air ; attack, defend, &c. 
In the most perfect examples, the words are alike in accent and number of sylla- 
bles, and they should occur in the same line, but this, of course, would be prac- 
ticable only to a very limited extent. Snorri gives a strophe of eight lines, com- 
posed wholly of such disparate couples, but in most of the varieties he describes, 
aauch greater license is allowed. 

Hattatal, c. 93-99. 



568 LOVE OF ALLITERATION. 

as any other writer. Such phrases as these are of constant 
occurrence in his prose works ; 

" Kemembrance still forced our thoughts to worke upon this place 
where we last (alas that the word last should so long last !) did grace our 
eyes upon her ever flourishing beauty." 

"Blessed be thou, Urania, the sweetest fairnesse, and the fairest sweet- 

nssse." 

Spenser seldom indulges in this fashion of his time, but has 
occasionally a euphuistic line, as these from the Shepheards 
Calendar : 

With mourning pyne I ; you with pyning mourne. 

The sovereigne of seas he blames in vaine, 
That, once sea-beate, will to sea againe. 

The style of Fuller is marked by the frequent recurrence 
of euphuistic expressions, but the exuberance of wit and 
humor, which overflows even the gravest works of a writer, 
whose amazing affluence of thought and imagination makes 
him one of the most valuable as well as entertaining of our 
old authors, leads us often to suspect a smile under the fanci- 
ful rhetoric of his most serious exhortations. 

It is to the comparative rarity of similar sounds, which in 
languages with terminal inflections are forced upon the ear to 
satiety, that we are to ascribe the love of every species of 
consonance, which at one time or another has marked the lit- 
erature of all the nations of Northern Europe. The passion 
for alliteration and rhyme is common to the Germans, the 
Scandinavians and the Anglican family, and the French are 
scarcely less fond than ourselves of puns, charades and co- 
nundrums ; while in Italy, where the inflections are much 
more numerous, no species of verbal wit is so much in vogue. 
The sermons of Abraham a Santa Clara are remarkable for 
their incessant use of alliteration, assonance and consonance, 



569 

and though of a later date than the events which form the 
subject of Schiller's great drama, are said to have served as 
the model for the Capuchin sermon in Wallenstein's Lager, of 
which a very felicitous translation will be found in an early 
number of the Foreign Review. 

The employment of imitative words, measures and caden- 
ces, in poetry, naturally connects itself with the subject we 
are considering. The ancient writers present many supposed 
examples of this ornament and adjunct to expression, but our 
great ignorance of the pronunciation of the classic languages, 
especially the Greek, exposes us to much risk of error in pro- 
nouncing on the resemblance between the sound and the 
sense. I cannot discuss this branch of the subject on the 
present occasion, and I shall confine myself to the use of 
purely imitative words. The employment of these in modern 
literature has generally been restricted to popular and roman- 
tic poetry, and in this they have been introduced with great 
success. The best examples I can call to mind are Burger's 
Lenore, and the very fine translation of it by Taylor. In 
neither of these is the imitation overcharged, or carried be- 
yond what we might expect to hear in a simple, but spirited 
and picturesque oral narrative of the scenes described in the 
poem. The translation does not in all points come up to the 
felicity of the original, but in some passages it surpasses it. 
Thus: 

She herde a knight with clank alight, 
And clirabe the stair with speed, 

is very good, but 

And soon she heard a tinkling hand 
That twirled at the pin, 

Lb quite inferior to the 

Ganz lose, leise, klinglingling, 



570 WEARINESS OF RHYME. 

of the original, while 

He cracked his whyppe ; the locks, the bolts, 
Cling-clang asunder flew, 

s not inferior to Burger's very best lines. In fact, both 
poems are examples of remarkable skill in the nse of mere 
sound as an accompaniment and intensive of sense. I know, 
however, in the whole range of imitative verse, no line supe- 
rior, perhaps I should say none equal, to that in Wild's cele- 
brated nameless poem : 

Yet as if grieving to efface 

All vestige of the human race, 

On that lone shore loud moans the sea. 

Here the employment of monosyllables, of long vowels and 
of liquids, without harsh consonantal sounds, together with 
the significance of the words themselves, gives to the verse a 
force of expression seldom if ever surpassed. 

The present literature of most European nations, certainly 
of the English and the Anglo-American people, exhibits abun- 
dant tokens of a satiety of hackneyed rhymes and stereo- 
typed forms, and it is a question of much practical interest, 
how far it is possible to find available substitutes or equiv- 
alents for them. It is certainly desirable that some check 
should be put upon the propensity to rebel against all the 
restraints, and overleap all the metrical canons of modern 
poetry, but it is impossible to determine beforehand whether 
the substitution of assonance and half-rhyme would be allow- 
able or advantageous. We do not now readily seize so vague 
resemblances of sound, but it seems not improbable that our ear 
might be trained to perceive and enjoy them, and in our 
weariness of familiar forms, the experiment is certainly worth 
trying. 



LECTURE XXVI. 

SYNONYMS AND EUPHEMISMS. 

"Webster's definition of synonym is as follows : " A noun 
or other word having the same signification as another is its 
synonym. Two words containing the same idea are syno- 
nyms." If this is a true definition, the French cheval and 
the English horse are synonyms of each other, because the 
one has " the same signification " as the other. Again, the 
verb to fear, the noun fear, the adjectives fearful and fear- 
less, and the adverb fearfully are synonyms, each of all the 
others, because they all " contain the same idea." The defi- 
nition is manifestly erroneous in both its parts. Cheval and 
horse are reciprocally translations, not synonyms, of each 
other ; and as to the other example I have cited, it is a viola- 
tion of the established use of the word to apply the term 
synonym to words of different grammatical classes, for syno- 
nyms are necessarily convertible, which different parts of 
speech cannot be. Synonym, in the singular number, hardly 
admits of an independent definition, for the notion of syno- 
nymy implies two correlative words, and therefore, though 
there are synonyms, there is in strictness no such thing as a 



572 SYNONYMS DEFINED. 

syno7iy?n, absolutely taken. Properly defined, synonyms are 
words of the same language and the same grammatical class, 
identical in meaning ; or, more generally, synonyms are 
words of the same language which are the precise equiva- 
lents of each other. And if a definition of the word in the 
singular be insisted on, we may say that a noun or other part 
of speech, identical in meaning with another word of the same 
language and the same grammatical class, is the synonym 
of that word ; or, less specifically, a synonym is a word 
identical in meaning with another word of the same lan- 
guage and the same grammatical class. But though this ifl 
the proper definition of true synonyms, it is by no means the 
ordinary use of the term, which is generally applied to words 
not id entical, but similar, in meaning. Both in p opular literary- 
acceptation, and as employed in special dictionaries of such 
words, synonyms are words sufficiently alike in general sig- 
nification to be liable to be confounded, but yet so different 
in special definition as to require to be distinguished. 

It has been denied that synonyms have any real existence 
in human speech, and critical writers have affirmed, that be 
tween two words of similar general signification some shade 
of difference in meaning is always discernible. Persons who 
think, and therefore speak, accurately, do indeed seldom use 
any two words in precisely the same sense, and with respect 
to words which do not admit of rigorously scientific defini- 
tion as terms of art, and which are neither names of sensuous 
objects, nor expressive of those primary ideas which are es<- 
sential to, if not constitutive of, the moral and intellectual 
nature of man, it is almost equally true that no two persons 
use any one word in exactly the same signification. Every 
man's conception of the true meaning of words is modified, 



WORDS SUBJECTIVE. 573 

both in kind and in degree, bv the idiosyn. rasies of his 
mental constitution. Language, as a medium of thought 
and an instrument for the expression of thought, is subjective, 
not absolute. We mould words into conformity with the 
organization of our inner man ; and though different persons 
might, under the same circumstances, use the same words, 
and even define them in the same terms, yet the ideas repre- 
sented by those words are more or less differenced by the 
mental characters and conditions of those who employ them. 
Hence, with the exceptions already made, all determinations 
of coincidence in, and distinction between, the meanings of 
words, are approximate only, and there is always an uncer- 
tain quantity which cannot be eliminated. 

Besides this inherent difficulty, common to all languages, 
there is the further fact, that in tongues of considerable ter- 
ritorial extension, there are often local differences of usage ; 
so that of two words of like meaning, one will be exclusively 
employed in one district, the other in another, to express pre- 
cisely the same idea. 

Again, the unpleasant effect of constant repetition often 
obliges both speakers and writers to employ different words 
for the same purpose. For instance, in this course of lec- 
tures, I must, to vary the phrase, and avoid wearisome itera- 
tion of the same word, use language, tongue, speech, words, 
dialect, idiom, discourse, vocabulary, nomenclature, phraseol 
ogy, often, indeed, in different acceptations, but frequently tc 
convey the same thought. For the same reason, one word ia 
often figuratively used as an equivalent of another very dif- 
ferent in its proper signification. Thus the wealthy English 
man employs gold, the less affluent and commercial French 
man silver, and the still poorer old Roman brass, as syno- 
nyms of money. 



574 POETICAL AND FIGURATIVE WORDS. 

There are, moreover, words not distinguishable in defini 
tion, but employed under different circumstances. Of thia 
character are many words which occur only in the poetic 
dialect, and in the ambitious style of writing called ' sensa- 
tion ' prose. These in some languages, as in Icelandic for ex 
ample, are so numerous as to make the poetic and the pros 
vocabularies very widely distinct. Of this class are blade 
brand, and falchion, for sword ; dame, damsel, maiden, for 
lady or girl ; steed, courser, charger, palfrey, for horse ; and 
there are also, in most languages^ many words peculiar to the 
sacred style or language of religion, but still having exact 
equivalents, the use of which is restricted to secular purposes. 
In general, words consecrated to religious and poetical uses, 
are either native terms, which in the speech of common life 
have been supplanted by alien ones, or they belong to foreign 
tongues, and have been introduced with foreign forms of 
poetical composition, or foreign religious instruction. 

Nations much inclined to the figurative or metaphorical 
style have usually numerous words synonymous in their use, 
though etymologically of different signification. Thus, the 
Arabic has a large number of names for the lion, and not 
fewer for the sword. The figurative dialect of the Icelanders 
is also extremely rich. Snorro's Edda enumerates an hundred 
and fifty synonyms for ' sword,' and a proportionate number 
for almost every other object which could be important in the 
poetic vocabulary. In such a profuse nomenclature as that 
of the Arabic and the Icelandic, a large proportion of the 
words were originally descriptive epithets, drawn from some 
quality or use of the object to which they are applied, and at 
other times they are taken from some incident in the popular 
mythology of the countries where they are employed. Our 



FIGURATIVE USE OF WORDS. 575 

own brand, which occurs also in Icelandic poetry as a name 
of the sword, is probably from the root of to burn, and refers 
to the flaming appearance of a well-polished blade. Other 
names are derived from the cntting properties of the edge, 
from the form of the blade, from the metal of which it was 
forged, and so of all its material qualities. These, of course, 
once conveyed distinct meanings, bnt in many instances, the 
etymology, though known to the learned, was popularly for- 
gotten, and thus these different words came at last to be, in 
common use, exact equivalents the one of the other. 

In composite languages like the English, there often occur 
words derived from different sources, which, though distin- 
guished in use, are absolutely synonymous in meaning. For 
example, we have globe from the Latin, sphere from the 
Greek. The one is fairly translated by the other, and they 
are identical in signification, inasmuch as all that can be truly 
affirmed of the one is true also of the other ; but they differ 
in use, and therefore we cannot always employ them inter- 
changeably, sphere belonging rather to scientific and poetical, 
globe to popular language. Allied to both these, and often 
confounded with, or substituted for them, is orb, from the Latin 
orb is. This word originally signified a circle, then a fiat 
object limited by a circular boundary, and it was applied 
both to the fellies of wheels, and to wheels cut out of solid 
timber without spokes, as they often are at this day in the 
East. Then it was transferred to the heavenly bodies, which 
present to the eye a plane surface bounded by a circle, or 
what we generally call a disc, from the Greek and Latin 
dis cus, a quoit, whence also possibly our word dish, and 
even the German Tisch, or table, from general resemblance 
of form. But when it was discovered that the sun and moon 



57G EUPHEMISM. 

were not discs but spheres, the word orb assumed the mean- 
ing of globe, and afterwards was extended in signification so 
as to embrace the hollow spheres of ancient astronomy. At 
present, though not susceptible of rigorously exact definition, 
orb is not distinguishable in sense from either globe or 
sphere, though its use is chiefly confined to poetical compo- 
sition. We have, then, a group of three words, sphere, globe, 
orb, properly synonymous, and we may add to them the word 
ball, as differing from the others only in being more loosely 
employed.* 

Out of difference of use with identity of signification 
grows what is called euphemism in language, or the substi- 
tution of refined or inoffensive words for gross or irritating 
ones, to convey precisely the same idea. It is difficult to un- 
derstand how, of two words or phrases precisely alike in 
meaning, one may be freely used under circumstances where 
the employment of the other would be considered a flagrant 
violation of the laws of decorum ; but it is probably to be ex- 
plained partly on the principle of association, which makes 
repulsive images doubly offensive, when they are suggested 
by words habitually employed by the vulgar and the vile, and 
strips them of half their grossness, when they are recalled by 
terms which have not yet been incorporated into the dialect 
of social debasement and of vice. The composite structure 
of English, giving us a double vocabulary, has supplied us 
with a larger stock of relatively euphemistic and vulgar ex- 
pressions than most languages possess, and it will generally 

* It is remarkable that not one of these words belongs to the Gothic family of 
languages, and, in fact, we have borrowed almost all our terms precisely descrip- 
tive of form from Romance sources. Bound, square, circle, cube, angle, line, 
surface, curve, all these are of Latin etymology, and our claim even to straight 
and flat, as native woi ds, is matter of dispute. 



EUPHEMISM. 



37^ 



be found that the Latin and French elements have furnished 
the words which are least offensive, probably because they 
are least familiar, and to our ears least expressive. In the 
want of the familiarity which, as the old proverb says, 
"breeds contempt," we find the true explanation of the 
different impression produced by euphemistic and vulgar 
words of the same meaning. And it is for the same reason, 
that coarseness of thought, or of diction, in the literature of 
languages in which we are not entirely at home, is a less 
repulsive, and therefore, perhaps, a more dangerous source 
of corruption. The frequent and ostentatious use of euphe- 
mistic expressions, however disagreeable as an affectation, 
arising as frequently from a conscious grossness of mind, 
which is only made more conspicuous by its awkward efforts 
to conceal itself, as from an honest fastidiousness, is, never- 
theless, less offensive than the contrary vice, for it deserves 
no milder name, of clothing the sacredest ideas, and com- 
municating the most solemn facts in the vocabulary of what, 
for want of a fitter word, we are obliged to designate as slang. 
Narrative and dramatic fiction has gone great lengths in 
the employment of this dialect in our times, and certain pop- 
ular writers have unfortunately succeeded in making many 
words belonging to it almost classical, but there are few 
things more certainly fatal to habits both of propriety of 
speech, and of delicacy and refinement of thought, than in- 
dulgence in so reprehensible a practice. True it is, the 
source of growth in language is in the people, but this source, 
unhappily, is not a " well of English undefiled," and though 
the popular mint yet strikes some coin of sterling gold, the 
majority of its issues are of a baser metal. 

There is another large class of words which ire used indif- 
87 



578 AFFIRMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTICLES. 

ferenfjy, not because they express precisely the same ideas> 
but because they do not express any clearly definable ideaa 
at all. Such are most terms of abuse and vituperation, 
which generally serve rather to convey an impression of the 
speaker's moral status, than a distinct notion of the exact 
character and degree of depravity he imputes to the subject 
of his discourse. This consideration suggests the duty, or at 
least the expediency, of extreme reserve in the use of words 
which give the hearer to understand, not that we have cause 
to believe the supposed offender to be guilty of any specific 
violation of the laws of God or man, but that we are ourselves 
in a frame of mind, which almost necessarily involves some 
sacrifice of self-respect, some disregard of that charity, which 
the obligations of both religion and society require us to show 
towards our fellow-man. 

De Quincey has said, and Trench quotes and approves 
the passage, that " all languages tend to clear themselves of 
synonyms as intellectual culture advances — the superfluous 
words being taken up and appropriated by new shades and 
combinations of thought evolved in the progress of society." 
De Quincey is here speaking of words strictly synonymous, 
not of those generally called synonyms, but which are distin- 
guishable both in meaning and in use. The remark might 
have been made more comprehensive, with equal truth, for 
there is a manifest inclination in modern languages to clear 
themselves not only of synonyms, but of all superfluous nice- 
ties of expression, and to this tendency we may in part as- 
cribe the rejection of inflections in grammar, in cases where 
the meaning is sufficiently plain without them. 

There is an example of the rejection of a needless subtlety 
in the case of our affirmative particles, yea and yes, nay and 



AFFIRMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTICLES. 579 

no, which were formerly distinguished in use, as the two 
affirmatives still are in our sister-tongues, the Danish and 
Swedish. The distinction was that yea and nay were an- 
swers to questions framed in the affirmative; as, Will he 
go ? Yea, or Nay. But if the question was framed in the 
negative, Will he not go ? the answer was Yes, or No. In 
Danish and Swedish the distinction is limited to the affirm- 
ative particles, and the negative form shows no trace of it. 
Thus to the question Will he go ? the affirmative answer is 
Ja f to the question Will he not go ? the affirmative answer 
is Jo, while Nei or in the Swedish orthography, Nej, is the 
negative answer to both.* 

* Although there are traces of these distinctions in Anglo-Saxon, I find no 
evidence that they were observed in Moeso-Gothic, and they were certainly un- 
known in Old-Northern, though modern Icelandic has recently borrowed from 
the Danish the particle jo, (j u,) as the affirmative answer to a negative 
question. 

In Moeso-Gothic, there are two forms of the affirmative particle. In Matthew, 
v. 37, in the command, " But let your communication be, Yea, yea ; Nay, nay ; " 
Ulphilas has J a, j a, N e , n e : but in Matth. ix. 28, Matth xi. 9, John xi. 27, 
and Luke vii. 26, where the query is in the affirmative form, and in Mark, vii. 
28, where the particle is intensive merely, no question preceding, j ai is used. 
The only form of the negative particle no found in Ulphilas is n e, (n i and n i h, 
signifying, not, neither, nor,) but in the existing remains of the Moeso-Gothio 
scriptures, but one case, John xviii. 25, occurs of a direct affirmative or nega- 
tive reply to a negative question. The other passages of the Gospels which 
contain such forms, as, Matth. xviii. 25, and John viii. 10, are wanting. 

In the Anglo-Saxon Gospels, John xxi. 15, 16, where the questions are put 
affirmatively, the answer is gea; in Matth. xvii. 25, to a negative question the 
unswer is gyse. In Luke xii. 51, xiii. 5, to affirmative questions, the negative 
answer is n e ; in John xxi. 5, and Matth. xiii. 29, the answer is n e s e ; in John i. 
21, and John xviii. 17, again n i c. In John viii. 10, a negative question is answered 
negatively n a, in John ix. 9, n e s e ; and in Luke xiii. 3, an affirmative question 
Ss answered negatively, Ne, secge ic, na, two forms being employed. In 
Aelfric's Homily on Pentecost day, (Homilies of Aelfric i. 316,) in the reply of 
Ss-pphira, quoted from Acts v. 8, gea, is the affirmative answer to an affirmative 
question. In the Saxon chronicle, An. MLXVIL, Ingram's edition, p. 267, i a 
(geaVis the reply to an earnestly repeated request. In Alfred's Boethius, c, 
xvi. § iv., and in c. xxxiv. § vi. gyse is the affirmative answer to negative ques- 



580 AFFIRMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTICLES. 

These distinctions seem to be refinements belonging to 
the period when all the modern European languages showed 
a living nisus formativus, a tendency to the development of 
new and original forms. The etymological ground of this 
subtlety has not been satisfactorily made out, and though 
there is no doubt that it originally rested, if not on a logical, 
yet at least on a grammatical foundation, it had, at the 
earliest period to which we can trace it back, become a mere 

tions; and in six cases in c. xiv. § 1, xxiv. § 4, c. xxvi. § 1, c. xxvii. § 2, 
n e s e, the negative reply to affirmative questions ; but in c. xxiv. § 4, n e s e 
answers negatively a question involving a negative. In Aelfrici Colloquium, 
Klipstein's Analecta, A.S.I, pp. 197, 198, and 203, we find affirmative questions 
affirmatively answered by gea, but on p. 199, gea is used for the same purpose 
with a question put negatively ; and on p. 202, nic occurs as the negative reply 
to an affirmative question. 

So far as these examples go, they, with a single exception, tend to prove 
that the distinction was made in the affirmative particle, but they show some 
vacillation in the use of the negative. I have examined Alfred's Orosius, the texts 
published by the Aelfric Society, all the poems in Grein's Bibliothek der Angel- 
Siichsischen Poesie, all the selections in Klipstein's Analecta, and many minor 
pieces, besides the volumes above referred to, without finding any other examples 
of the use of the particles as replies to direct questions, though there are many 
instances of the employment of both as intensives. 

Further search might probably lead to more decisive results, but the difficulty 
of investigating such points, without verbal indexes to the authors consulted, 
Justifies me in leaving the question to grammatical inquirers. It may here be 
observed, that the want of complete verbal indexes to our classic authors is a 
very serious inconvenience in all investigations in English philology. Even 
Cruden often omits the minor words which, in purely grammatical questions, are 
as important as any. Mrs. Cowden Clarke's laborious Concordance to Shaks- 
peare is even more imperfect ; for instance, she cites several passages where 
sith is used, but since is not a word of reference in the Concordance, which 
therefore, does not furnish the means of ascertaining whether Shakspeare, like 
his contemporaries, distinguished between these forms. 

Gil, who lived in Shakspeare's age, informs us that soon had lately acquired 
a peculiar sense. " Quikli cito, suner citior aut citius, silnest citissimus aut 
citissime, namsim hodieapud plurimos significat ad primamvesperam, olim, cito." 
Log. Ang. 2d Ed. p. 34. Soon is not in Mrs. Clarke's Concordance, and there 
fore it does not help us in the inquiry, whether Shakespeare ever gave this 
meaning to that adverb. Is soon, in this sense, the same word, or of another 
etymology? Minshew, under soone, refers to evening. See App. 75. 



AFFIRMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTICLES. 581 

verbal nicety wholly independent of the point of view from 
which the question was regarded by the speaker, and there- 
fore adding nothing to the force or clearness of expression. 
A subtlety like this, a distinction in words which suggests 
no difference of thought, was repugnant to the linguistic 
sense of an intellectual, and at the same time a practical 
people, and it, therefore, did not long survive after the gen- 
eral diffusion of literary culture among the English nation. 
It may be doubted whether modern scholars would have de- 
tected the former existence of this obsolete nicety, if it had 
not been revealed to us by Sir Thomas More's criticism upon 
Tyndale, for neglecting it in his translation of the New Tes- 
tament. That it was in truth too subtle a distinction for 
practice is shown by Sir Thomas More himself, for he mis- 
states the rule when condemning Tyndale for the violation 
of it, and what is not less remarkable is the fact, that Home 
Tooke, Latham, (Eng. Lang., 2d ed., p. 528,) and Trench, 
(Study of Words, 156,) have all referred to or quoted More's 
observations, without appearing to have noticed the dis- 
crepancy between the rule, as he states it, and his exemplifi- 
cation of it. The question is so curious in itself, and More's 
works are so rare in this country, that I shall be pardoned 
for quoting the whole passage relating to it. It will be 
found in " The Confutacyon of Tyndales Aunswere made 
anno 1532, by Syr Thomas More," page 448 of the collected 
edition of More's works printed in 1557. The text criticized 
is John i. 21, as translated by Tyndale, which More quotes 
as follows ; " And thei asked him, what then, art thou He- 
lias ? And he sayd I am not. Arte thou a prophete ? And 
he aunswered, No." 

Upon this our author remarks : 

" I woulde here note by the way, that Tyndal here traa- 



582 AFFIRMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTICLES. 

latetli no for nay, for it is but a trifle and mistaking of ye 
Engiishe worde ; saning that ye shoulde see yt he whych in 
two so plaine engiishe wordes, and so commen as is naye and 
no, can not tell when he should take the tone and whe the 
tother, is not for translating into engiishe a man very meete. 
For the use of these two wordes in aunswering a question is 
this. No aunswereth the question framed by the affirmative. 
As for ensample, if a manne should should aske Tindall hym- 
self: ys an heretike mete to translate holy scripture into 
engiishe? Lo to thys question if he will aunswere trew 
engiishe he must aunswere naye and not no. But and if the 
question be asked hym thus, lo ; Is not an heretyque mete to 
translate holy scripture into Engiishe ? To thys questio lo 
if he wil auswere true engiishe he must auswere no and not 
nay. And a lyke difference is there betwene these two 
aduerbes ye and yes. For if the question be framed unto 
Tindall by the affirmative in thys fashion ; If an heretique 
falsely translate the newe testament into engiishe, to make 
hys false heresyes seeme ye worde of Godde, be hys books 
worthy to be burned ? To this question asked in thys wyse 
yf he will aunswere true engiishe he must aunswere ye and 
not yes. But no we if the question be asked hym thus lo by 
the negative ; If an heretike falsely translate the newe testa- 
ment into Engiishe, to make hys false heresyes seme the 
word of God, be not his bokes well worthy to be burned % 
To thys question in thys fashion framed : if he wyll aunswere 
trew englyshe he may not aunswere ye, but he must aun- 
&were yes, and say, yes mary be they bothe the translation 
and the translatour, and al that wyll holde wyth them." 

The first question supposed is in the affirmative form ; 
" Ys an heretike mete to translate holy scripture into Eng- 
iishe ? " and if Sir Thomas is right in answering it by nay 



AFFIRMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTICLES. 583 

as lie unquestionably is, then his first rule, " JVo aunswereth 
the question framed by the affirmative," is wrong. Tooke 
calls this " a ridiculous distinction," and evidently supposes 
that it was .an invention of Sir Thomas himself. Later 
writers, also, have doubted whether there is any ground for 
believing that such a rule ever existed. It is, however, cer 
tain that the distinction was made, and very generally ob- 
served, from the end of the fourteenth century to about the 
time of Tyndale and Sir Thomas More, soon after which it 
became obsolete.* 

* Yes (yuse) occurs in Layaraon, (ii. 297,) in answer to a question affirma- 
tively framed, but still in a form implying disbelief, and thus may be considered 
as following the rule. I believe yea and no are not found in that work, but nay 
is twice used as an intensive. In the Ormulum, I think there is no instance of 
a direct question with an answer by either particle. Yea and nay are the only 
forms given in Coleridge's Glossarial Index to the Literature of the thirteenth 
century, but I have not the means of consulting the authorities referred to. Yea 
is used by Robert of Gloucester, in answer to an affirmative question, and nay by 
him and Robert of Brunne, but I believe as an intensive only. I have not met with 
either yes or no, or indeed a proper case for the use of them, that is, a question put 
negatively and admitting a direct answer, in any English author earlier than Wyc- 
liffe and his contemporaries. In Piers Ploughman, yea and nay are found several 
times as answers to affirmative questions, and as intensives in other cases. JVo occurs 
in verse 8977 of the Vision, without a question preceding, and yes in verse 6750, 
under similar circumstances. Yes is used in verses 2721 and 11963, in both 
cases according to the rule ; in verse 3776, as an intensive, in reply to a negative 
assertion ; and in verse 2937, contrary to the rule, as an answer to a query put 
affirmatively. 

Gower employs yea and yes, nay and no, almost indiscriminately, and of 
course without regard to the rule. 

Wycliffe, according to the Oxford edition of 1850, in Matthew xvii. 25, uses 
yea, contrary to the rule, but the later text of the same passage has yes in con- 
formity to it. In Romans iii. 29, in both texts, yes conforms to the rule. In 
James v. 12, Wycliffe has yes, the later version yea. In Matth. v. 37, ix. 28, xi. 
9, xiii. 29, 51, xv. 27, xxi. 16, Luke xii. 57, Johu i. 21, xi. 27, xxi. 5, 15, 16, Acts 
v. 8, xxii. 27, Romans iii. 9, 28, yea and nay answer questions affirmatively 
framed. I believe no does not occur in the Wycliffite versions of the New Tes- 
tament as an adverb, the answer to the negative question in John viii. 10 being 
"no man." In John ix. 9, nay is used in both texts, apparently as an answer 
to a negative question, but this is a doubtful case, for the particle may perhaps 



584 SITH AND SITHENCE. 

Yes and no were usually, though not with absolute uni 
formity, limited to the office of answering a question nega- 
tively framed, while yea and nay served both as answers to 
affirmative questions, and as intensives in reply to remarks 
not made interrogatively. 

As this idle refinement was passing away, there arose a 
real, substantial distinction between two particles, or rather 
between two forms of the same particle, which had pre- 
viously been used indiscriminately in two different senses. 
Down to the middle of the sixteenth century, and indeed 
somewhat later, sith, seththe, syth, sithe, sythe, sithen, sithan, 
sythan, sithence, since, syns, and sens were indifferently em- 
ployed, both in the signification of seeing that, inasmuch as, 
considering, and of after or afterwards. About that period 
good authors established a distinction between the forms, 

be regarded as a contradiction to the affirmative answer of " othere men." Hence 
it will be seen that though Wycliffe occasionally departs from the rule, the later, 
orPurvey's, text, with the doubtful exception just cited, uniformly adheres to it. 
In Chaucer, I find, upon a cursory examination, fifty instances of the occur- 
rence of yea, yes, nay and no, and in these there is but a single case of disregaid 
of the rule. In this example, nay answers an affirmative question, and there are 
two or three cases where yes is employed as an intensive, generally however 
in reply to remarks involving a negative. In a like number of examples in 
Mallorye's Morte d'Arthur, Southey's reprint, I find the distinction made with 
equal uniformity, and the observance of the rule is very nearly constant in Lord 
Berners' Arthur of Little Britain, and in the Froissart of the same translator. It 
is in most cases followed in the works of Skelton, though in this latter writer's 
time, usage had begun to vacillate. I have examined many other authors with 
the like result, and think we may say that from the time of Chaucer to that of 
Tyndale, the distinction in question was as well established as any rule of English 
grammar whatever. 

Sir Thomas More's criticism on Tyndale was not universally acquiesced in, 
for Coverdale, whose translation was printed in 1535, Cranmer in 1539, the 
Geneva in 1557, and the Rhemish in 1582, as well as the authorized version in 
1611, all have No, in the text John i. 21. Indeed, I think Sir Thomas himself 
was the last important author who followed the rule, though in the early part of 
his life, as is sufficiently shown by the works of Lord Berners, it was still in fuU 
vigor. See App. 76. 



SITH AND SITHENCE. 585 

and used sith only as a logical word, an illative, while 
sithence and since, whether as prepositions or as adverbs, 
remained mere narrative words, confined to the signification 
of time after. 

It is evident, that although the former of these notions is 
a derivative, the latter a primitive sense, they are neverthe- 
less distinct, and it is very, desirable to be able to discrimi- 
nate between them by appropriate words. The radical is 
tound in a great number of forms in Anglo-Saxon and the 
related languages, and in all of them has primarily the sense 
of time after. But the conclusion is always posterior to the 
reason, and post hoc, ergo propter hoc is the universal expression 
of all that the human intellect knows concerning the relation 
of cause and effect. Hence, it was very natural that a word 
implying historical sequence should acquire the sense of log- 
ical consequence. The discrimination between the two 
meanings, and the appropriation of a separate form to each, 
originated in the subtle, metaphysical turn of mind which 
characterized the fathers of the Reformation in England, nor 
have I, upon an examination of the works of numerous 
writers of earlier periods, been able to find one, who clearly 
distinguishes the two senses by the use of different forms. 
Some authors employ for both purposes sith alone, some 
sit hen or sithence, others sens or syns, and others, again, two 
or more of these modes of spelling. The fullest, most uni 
form, and most satisfactory exemplifications of the discrimi 
nation will be found in Spenser, who seldom neglects it, Syl* 
vester the translator of Du Bartas, and Hooker. All these 
writers belong to the later half of the sixteenth century / 
immediately after which all the forms of the word except 
since went out of use, and of course the distinction, which 



586 SITH 3JSTD SITHENCE. 

seemed to have become well established, perished with them. 
The English Bible of 1611 generally employs since for both 
purposes, but it is a curious fact that in the book of Jeremiah 
both forms are used, and in every instance accurately dis- 
criminated. The disappearance of the double form and 
double sense of the word was very sudden, for though the 
distinction was observed, by writers as popular as any in the 
literature, down to the very end of the sixteenth century, yet 
in Minsheu's Guide into the Tongues, an English polyglot 
dictionary, first published in 1617, since is the only form 
given for both senses, and sythan is simply referred to as 
" Old English."* 

In speaking of the introduction of the neuter possessive 
its, on a former occasion, I observed that in the embarrass- 
ment between the new word and the incongruous use of his 
as a neuter, many writers for a considerable period employed 
neither form. There was a similar state of things with re- 
gard to sith and since at the beginning of the seventeenth 
century, and there are important English authors who sys- 
tematically avoid them both. 

* I have not cited Shakespeare as an authority for the distinction in ques- 
tion, because, for want of an entirely satisfactory text, I find it impossible to 
determine whether he constantly observed it or not. Mrs. Clarke's Concordance 
does not inform us what edition was made the basis of her labors, but as she 
occasionally cites diiferent texts, I presume all those consulted by her agree upon 
this particular point. The Concordance gives sixteen examples of the use of 
sith, in all cases as an illative, but sithence occurs in All's Well that Ends Well, 
i. 3, in the same sense, as, according to Knight's text, does since, also, in Ham- 
let v. 2, Twelfth Night v. 1, twice, King Richard II. ii. 1, twice, do. sc. 2. Part 
I. K. Henry IV. v. 5, and Henry V. i. 1. Since is used for time after in Twelfth 
Night v. 1, twice in All's Well that Ends Well, iii. 7, in Romeo and Juliet i. 2, 
twice, and in As You Like It v. 2. Many other examples of the use of since in 
both senses might be given ; and therefore it would appear that while Shake- 
speare used sith only as an illative, he employed since indifferently to express 
sequence and consequence. Perhaps a critical examination of the first editions 
might determine the question, and I think it highly probable that the double uso 
of since is chargeable to the editors or printers, not to the author. 



EQUIVOCAL PARTICLES. 587 

It is much to be regretted that later writers have disre- 
garded a distinction logically so important. The restoration 
of sith, and with it of the distinction between sith and since, 
would be a substantial benefit to the English language, and 
I have little doubt that a popular writer who should revive 
it would find himself sustained by the good sense of the 
Anglican people. 

Many of our particles, the conjunctions especially, are 
very equivocal in their signification, and we much need a 
new alternative and a new conjunctive. The particle or is 
said by grammarians to be used both as a conjunctive and 
as a disjunctive. The double sense of this word, which may 
imply in one period that two objects or propositions are 
equivalent, if not identical, in another, that they are unlike, 
diverse, incongruous, is a fertile source of equivocation in 
language, and it is very singular that the urgent want of two 
alternatives has not developed a new one, and restricted our 
uncertain or to a single meaning. The conjunction and is 
almost equally vague in signification. We find an exempli- 
fication of this in the case of " Stradling versus Stiles," 
where Pope, or Swift, or Arbuthnot, or perhaps all three, 
have illustrated the uncertainty of the law and of language 
by supposing a will, in which a testator, possessed of six 
black horses, six white horses and six pied, or hl&ck-and- 
white, horses, bequeathed to A B " all my black and white 
horses," and thereupon raising the question, whether the be- 
quest carried the black horses, and the white horses, or the 
black-and-white horses only. The equivocation here does 
not, indeed, lie wholly in the conjunction, but, nevertheless, 
the use of a proper disjunctive particle, had such a one ex- 
isted, would have prevented it. 

The loss of the short-lived distinction between sith and 



588 METAPHYSICAL DISTINCTIONS. 

eitlience or since, is an exception to the general tendency of 
English, which is towards the discrimination of similar 
shades of thought in logical, metaphysical, argumentative, 
and gesthetical language, and to the rejection of needless sub- 
ileties in the designation of material things. In proportion 
as we multiply distinctions between intellectual functions, 
and between moral states or their manifestations, and conse- 
quently the words to express them, as we enlarge the nomen- 
clature of criticism, and subtilize the vocabulary of ethics 
and metaphysics, we incline to discard nice differences be- 
tween terms properly belonging to material acts and objects, 
and to suffer words expressive of them to perish. An indi- 
vidual or a people earnestly occupied with serious studies, or 
other pursuits making large demands on the intellect, will 
habitually neglect the vocabulary of arts and occupations of 
a lower grade, and will disregard distinctions between the 
names of acts and things too trivial and insignificant to be 
susceptible of important differences. Few city counsellors, 
indeed, would now boast, with Lord Erskine, that they could 
not distinguish a field of lavender from a field of wheat ; * 
but every man familiar with country-life is aware that even 
farmers now confound in name many of the operations of 
rural economy, which were formerly distinguished by appro- 
priate terms. The vocabulary of the field and the kitchen, 
except as it is enlarged by the introduction of new processes, 
new objects, and new subjects of thought and conversation, 
grows poor, as the dialect of the intellect and the conscience 
becomes more copious, comprehensive, and refined. I may 
exemplify what I mean by the word fetch, which, though 
still in use in England, is becoming less common in that 

* Cobbett. Treatise on Cobbetts Corn, p. 1. 



DISAPPEARANCE OF SIJBTILTIES. 58£> 

country, and has grown almost wholly obsolete in many 
parts of the United States. Fetch properly includes the 
going in search of the object, and go, when used with it, is 
redundant, because it only expresses what fetch implies. 
Fetch is almost exactly equivalent to the German hoi en, 
and, as is said of the latter word, he only can fetch a thing 
who goes purposely after it. JSTow the distinction between 
fetching that which we go expressly to seek, and bringing 
that which we have at hand or procure incidentally, is com. 
paratively unimportant, and may well be disregarded as a 
thing of inferior moment. Hence it is not often heard among 
us. The distinction between carrying and bringing is more 
simple and obvious, and both words are accordingly retained, 
but there is a tendency to confound even these, and it is not 
improbable that one of them may go out of use. 

Thus far the disappearance of words indicative of insig- 
nificant distinctions, and which only tend to burden the 
memory with useless lumber, is not an evil to be deplored, 
but there were in Anglo-Saxon and in the Scandinavian sister- 
tongues, numerous words expressive of slight differences of 
structure or outline in the features of natural scenery, the 
decay of which is a loss both to poetical imagery, and to pre- 
cision of geographical nomenclature, though their places have 
been more or less adequately supplied by new terms of for- 
eign importation. Some of these words still exist as proper 
names of particular localities, though no longer current as 
common nouns. The admirers of Wordsworth will remem- 
ber two of them, which occur more than once in his poems, 
as parts of local names, gil a rocky ravine, and fors or force 
a cascade or water-fall. It is a curious circumstance with 
regard to both of these words, that they are Old-Northern, 
and not met with in the extant remains of Anglo-Saxon lit- 



590 SYNONYMS OF THE CHASE. 

erature, and hence they were probably applied to particular 
localities by the Danish invaders of England, and never 
understood as descriptive terms by the natives who adopted 
them. 

The largest class of duplicates of common words which 
has become obsolete is perhaps that of the technical terms of 
the chase. In the days of feudal power and splendor, hawk- 
ing and hunting constituted the favorite recreation of the 
higher classes, and the importance attached to these sports, 
both as healthful amusements and as a half-military training, 
naturally led to the cultivation and enlargement of the vocab- 
ulary belonging to their exercise. The early English press 
teemed with treatises on the chase, and the Book of St. 
Albans first printed in I486, is very full on the subject of 
the nomenclature of the gentle craft. From this and other 
works on the same subject, we learn that the nobler beasts 
and fowls of chase took different names for every year of 
their lives, until full maturity, as domestic animals still do 
to some extent in this country, but more especially in Eng- 
land, and that all the important parts, products, and func- 
tions of each of these animals had its peculiar designation 
not common to the corresponding part or act of other quad- 
rupeds or birds. The habits of different creatures, and all 
the operations of the chase connected with each, had terms 
exclusively appropriated to the species, and even the art of 
carving changed its name with the game upon which it was 
exercised. Thus Dame Juliana Berners, the reputed author 
of the book of St. Albans, informs us that in gentle speech it 
is said " the hauke joukyth, not slepeth ; she refourmeth her 
feders, and not pyckyth her feelers ; she rowsith, and not 
shaketh herselfe ; she mantellyth, and not stretchyth, when 
she putty tli her legges from her, one after a nother, and her 



SYNONYMS OF THE CHASE. 591 

wynges folowe her legges ; and when she hath mantylled her 
and bryngeth both her wynges togyder over her backe ; ye 
shall save youre hawkye warbellyth her wynges." So, to 
designate companies, we must not use names of multitudes 
promiscuously, but we are to say a congregacyon of people, 
a hoost of men, a felyshyppynge of yomen, and a levy of 
ladyes ; we must speak of a herde of dere, swannys, cranys, 
or wrenys, a sege of herons or bytourys, a muster of pecockes, 
a watohe of nyghtyngales, a flyghte of doves, a claterynge 
of choughes, a pryde of lyons, a slewthe of beeres. a gagle of 
geys, a skulke of foxes, a stfwZfe of frerys, a pontificalitye of 
prestys, and a superjkcyte of nonnes, and so of other human 
and brute assemblages. In like manner, in dividing game 
for the table, the animals were not carved, but a dere was 
broken, a gose reryd, a chekyn frusshed, a cony unlaced, a 
crane dysplayed, a curlewe unioynted, a quayle wgnggyd, a 
swanne lyfte, a lambe sholdered, a heron dysmembryd, a pe- 
cocke dysfygured, a samon chynyd, a hadoke sydyd, a sole 
loynyd and a breme splayed. The characteristic habits, 
traces, and other physical peculiarities of animals were dis- 
criminated in the language of the chase with equal precision, 
and a strict observance of all these niceties of speech was 
more important as an indication of breeding, or in the words 
of Dame Juliana Berners, as a means of distinguishing " gen- 
tylmen from ungentylmen," than a rigorous conformity to 
the rules of grammar, or even to the moral law. 

The old romances ascribe the invention of the vocabulary 
of the chase to the famous Sir Tristram of the Round Table, 
and the Morte d' Arthur says : 

" Me semeth alle gentylmen that beren old armes oughte 
of ryght to honoure syre Trystram for the goodly termes that 
gentilmen have and use, and shalle to the daye of dome, that 



592 STUDY OF SYNONYMS. 

there by in a maner alle men of worship maye disscover a 
gentylman fro a yoman, and from a yoman a vylayne. For 
he that gentyl is wylle drawe hym nnto gentil tatches, and 
to folowe the cnstommes of noble gentylmen." 

That most of these words pointed originally to a real dif- 
ference between the objects or the processes indicated by 
them, there is little doubt, bnt the etymology of many of 
them is lost, and those not now retained in different, or, if 
similar, more general applications, have become wholly obso- 
lete, thongh some which have disappeared from literature 
still exist in popular or provincial usage. 

The study of synonyms has always been regarded as one 
of the most valuable of intellectual disciplines, independently 
of its great importance as a guide to the right practical use of 
words. The habit of thorough investigation into the mean- 
ing of words, and of exact discrimination in the use of them, 
is indispensable to precision and accuracy of thought, and it 
is surprising how soon the process becomes spontaneous, and 
almost mechanical and utj conscious, so that one often finds 
himself making nice and yet sound distinctions between par- 
ticular words which he is not aware that he has ever made 
the subject of critical analysis. The subtle intellect of the 
Greeks was alive to the importance of this study, and we not 
only observe just discrimination in the employment of lan- 
guage in their best writers, but we not unfrequently meet 
with discussions as to the precise signification of words, 
which show that their exact import had become a subject of 
thoughtful consideration, before much attention had been be- 
stowed upon grammatical forms. In a tongue in the main 
homogeneous, and full of compounds and derivatives, the 
source of the word would naturally be first appealed to as 
the key to its interpretation. Etymology is still an indis- 



ENGLISH SYNONYMS. 593 

pensable auxiliary to the study of synonyms ; out in a com- 
posite language like English, where the root-fc rms are inac- 
cessible to the majority of those who nse it, the primary sig- 
nification of the radical does not operate as a conservative 
influence, as it did in Greece, by continually suggesting the 
meaning, and thus keeping the derivative or compound true 
to its first vocation. Words with us incline to diverge from 
the radical meaning ; and therefore etymology, though a very 
useful clew to the signification, is, at the same time, a very 
uncertain guide to the actual use, of words. And this is 
especially true of what may be called secondary derivatives, 
or words formed by derivation or composition from forms, 
themselves derivative or compound, or borrowed from for- 
eign sources. The study of words of this class is one of the 
most difficult points of our synonymy ; and it is often a very 
puzzling question to decide why, for example, two substan- 
tives allied in meaning should be distinguished by one shade 
of signification, and the corresponding adjectives, which we 
have formed from them, by a totally different one. I ob- 
jected to the latter part of Webster's definition of synonym, 
because, by applying that name to all words " containing the 
same idea," it makes different parts of speech synonyms, 
which is contrary to established usage. We have no term 
to designate words differing in etymology, and in grammat- 
ical character, but otherwise agreeing in meaning; but to 
pairs of words, derived from the same root, and differenced 
in meaning only by grammatical class, we apply the epithet 
conjugate, or, more rarely, that of paronymous. Strictly 
speaking, the ideas expressed by the two must be identical ; 
bit, as they are more generally distinguished by some slight 
difference of meaning, the term conjugate is loosely used to 
38 



594. ENGLISH SYNONYMS. 

express identity in etymology, with only general xikeness of 
meaning, in words of different classes. Cost and costly, foi 
example, are strictly conjugate ; faith and faithful, in some 
of their senses, are exactly so, in others not ; while grief and 
grievous, polish of manner and politeness of manner, grace 
and gracious, pity and pitiful, as ordinarily used, express 
quite different ideas. The verb to affect has a number of dis- 
parate uses in its different inflected forms and its derivatives. 
When it means to produce an effect upon, to influence, or to 
like, to have a partiality for, it has no conjugate noun ; for 
affection, in neither sense, exactly corresponds to the verb. 
Affect, to simulate, to pretend, and affectation, are conjugate, 
although not generally considered so, because most persons 
are not aware that the unnatural airs, called affectation, are 
really founded in hypocrisy, or false assumption. The par- 
ticiples and participial adjective affecting, touching, or excit- 
ing to sympathy or sorrow, and the passive form affected, 
have still another meaning, in which the active verb is rarely 
employed. 

Few languages are richer than English in approximate 
synonyms and conjugates ; and it is much to be regretted 
that no competent scholar has yet devoted himself to the 
investigation of this branch of our philology. The little 
manual, edited by Archbishop Whately, containing scarcely 
more than four hundred words, is, so far as it goes, the most 
satisfactory treatise we have on the subject.* Crabbe's 



* The Saxon part of our vocabulary, partly from the inherent character of 
the class of ideas for the embodiment of which it is chiefly employed, and partly 
because of its superior expressiveness, is generally very free from equivocation, 
and its distinctions of meaning are usually clearly marked. The number of 
Anglo-Saxon words approximate to each other in signification is small, and the 
distinction between those liable to be confounded is grammatical, more frequently 



ENGLISH SYNONYMS. 595 

Synonyms, much nsed in this country, is valuable chiefly for 
its exemplifications ; but the author's great ignorance of ety- 
mology has led him into many errors ;* and it cannot pretend 
to compare with the many excellent works on the synonymy 
of the German, French, Danish, and other European Ian 
guages. But in the increasing interest which the study of 
English is exciting, this, as well as other branches of lexico- 
graphy, will doubtless receive a degree of attention, which 
will contribute to give to the history of English a rank cor- 
responding to the importance of that tongue, as one of the 
most powerful instruments of thought and action assigned by 
Providence to the service of man. 



than logical. In the Treatise on Synonyms, edited by Whately, something more 
than four hundred and fifty words are examined and discriminated, and of these 
less than ninety are Anglo-Saxon. The relative proportions in Crabbe's much 
larger work are not widely different. 

* Exempli gratia, doze, (allied to the Anglo-Saxon, dwaes, and the Danish 
verb, dose,) we are informed, is a " variation from the French dors, and the 
Latin dormio, to sleep, which was anciently dermio, and comes from the 
Greek Se/j,ua, a skin, because people lay on skhu when they slept ! " Crabbe, Syn. 
under sleep. With equal learning and felicity, he derives daub from "do and ub, 
fiber, over, signifying literally to do over with any Ihing unseemly." 



LECTURE XXVII. 

TRANSLATION. 

The study of synonymy, or the discrimination between 
vernacular words allied in signification, and of etymology, or 
the comparison of derivative words with their primitives, 
naturally suggests the inquiry how far there is an exact cor- 
respondence of meaning between the native vocabulary, and 
that of foreign tongues, or, in other words, whether a poem, 
a narrative, or a discussion, composed in one language can 
be precisely rendered into another. If we may trust the dic- 
tionaries, almost every English word has synonyms in the 
speech to which it belongs, and equivalents in every other ; 
but a more critical study of language, as actually employed, 
teaches us, first, that true synonyms are everywhere of rare 
occurrence, and secondly that, with the exception of the 
names of material objects and of material acts, there is sel- 
dom a precise coincidence in meaning between any two 
words in different languages. The sensuous perceptions, 
even, of men are not absolutely identical, but they neverthe- 
less so far concur, that we may consider the names given in 
different countries to things cognizable by the senses as 



FREQUENCY OF TRANSLATIONS. 597 

equivalent to each other, though the epithets by which the 
objects are characterized, and the qualities ascribed to them, 
may differ. But the moment we step out of the domain of 
the senses, and begin to apply to acts and objects belonging 
to the world of mind, names derived from the world of mas- 
ter, we diverge from each other, and every nation forms a 
Tocabulary suited to its own moral and intellectual character, 
its circumstances, habits, tastes and opinions, but not pre- 
cisely adapted to the expression of the conceptions, emotions 
and passions of any other people. Hence the difficulty of 
making translations, which are absolutely faithful re-produc- 
tions of their originals. 

There are at the present day conflicting influences in 
operation, which tend, on the one hand, to individualize the 
languages of Europe, and make them more idiomatic and 
discordant in structure, and on the other, to harmonize and 
assimilate them to each other ; and the same influences are 
acting respectively as hindrances and as helps to the making 
of translations between them. To the latter, the helps, be- 
long the increased facilities of communication, the general 
study, in every country, of the literature of several others, 
the influence of two or three cosmopolite languages, like Eng- 
lish, French and German, the extended cultivation of philo- 
logical science, and the universality of the practice of trans- 
lation, which has compelled scholars to find or fashion, in 
their own speech, equivalents, or at least exponents, of the 
idioms of all others. The Caledonian, indeed, does not believe 
that the novels of Scott can be adequately translated into 
any foreign tongue ; the German affirms that Eichter is to 
be understood and enjoyed only in the original Teutonic ; and 
the American doubts whether the Libyan English of Uncle 



598 FREE AND LITER 1L TRANSLATION'. 

Tom's Cabin can be rendered into any other dialect. Never 
theless, each of these has had numerous translations, whose 
success proves that they are tolerable representatives, if nol 
exact counterparts, of their originals. 

The opposing influence is the spirit of nationality and 
linguistic purism, which has revived so many dying, and 
purged and renovated so many decayed and corrupted Euro- 
pean languages within the last century. In almost every 
Continental country, foreign words and phrases have been 
expelled, and their places supplied by native derivatives, com- 
pounds and constructions ; obsolete words have been restored, 
vague and anomalous orthography conformed to etymology 
or to orthoepy, and thus both the outward dress and the 
essential spirit of each made more national and idiomatic, 
and, therefore, to some extent, more diverse from all others, 
and less capable of being adequately rendered into any of 
them. At the same time, this purification and reconstruc- 
tion of languages has brought them all back to certain prin- 
ciples of universal or rather of Indo-European grammar com- 
mon to all, and in each, the revival of forgotten words and 
idioms has so enlarged their vocabulary, and increased their 
compass and flexibility, that it is easier to find equivalents for 
foreign terms and constructions, than when their stock of 
words and variety of expression was more restricted. Upon 
the whole, then, better translations are now practicable than 
at any former period of literary history ; and every popular 
author may hope to see his works repeated in many forms, 
none of which he need be ashamed to own as his offspring. 

The question between the relative merits of free and lit- 
eral translation, between paraphrastic liberty and servile 
fidelity, has been long discussed ; but, like many other abstract 
questions, it depends for its answer upon ever-varying condi- 



FKEE AND LITEEAL TRANSLATION". 599 

tions, and there is no general formula to express its solution 
The commentators on the famons Horatian precept : 

Nee verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus 
Interpres, 

night have saved themselves some trouble, if they had ob- 
served, what is plain from the context, that Horace was not 
speaking of translations at all, but of theatrical adaptation, 
dramatization, as we now say, of epic or historical subjects, 
which had been already treated in narrative prose or verse by 
other writers ; and, therefore, the opinion of the great Roman 
poet, were it otherwise binding, could not be cited as an 
authority on this question.* The rule of Hooker : " Of 

* Mueh of modern opinion on ancient literature and philosophy is founded 
on the criticism of familiar quotations, the examination of detached passages, 
which, standing alone, appear to contain a very different meaning from that 
which they express when taken in connection with their context, or the circum- 
stances under which they were uttered. An example of this is the sentiment in 
Cicero's Tusculan Questions, I. 17, so often quoted and moralized upon as an 
instance of excessive and almost idolatrous reverence for a majestic and impos- 
ing human intellect: " Errare mehercule malo cum Platone * * * quam 
cum istis vera sentire." Even in the Guesses at Truth, second series, third 
edition, p. 235, this passage is treated as the expression of a humiliating general 
submission to the authority of Plato, and Cicero is in part exonerated from the 
disgrace of so unworthy a sentiment, by the remark that he puts the words into 
the mouth of " the young man whom he is instructing," though it is admitted 
that he approved and adopted them. But it is plain to any one who will take 
the trouble to read enough of the dialogue in which this passage occurs, to 
understand the bearing of it upon the subject under discussion, that the " young 
man" expressed, and Cicero approved, no such deference to the authority of the 
Greek philosopher as is, upon the strength of this quotation, so often imputed to 
Cicero himself. The immediate point then under discussion was the question of 
the immortality of the soul, which was maintained by Plato, but denied by the 
Epicureans, and it is, evidently, solely with reference to the conclusions of 
Plato on this one point, not the weight of his authority, that the disciple and his 
master agree in preferring to share with him the beneficent possible error of 
eternal life, rather than the fearful and pernicious truth, if it were a truth, of 
final annihilation, with his opponents. 

And how comes it, that among the thousands of rhetorical critics, who, since 



600 FREE AND LITERAL TRANSLATION. 

translations, the better I acknowledge that, which conieth 
nearer to the very letter of the very original verity," i? 
equivocal, because it is not certain, whether " original ver- 
ity " means ' original sense? which most would approve, or 
' original words? which most would condemn, for the reason 
that the idiomatic differences between different languages 
would often make a literal translation of the several words 
of a foreign author unintelligible nonsense. Fuller, with his 
usual quaint felicity, has well expressed the common loose 
theory by a simile. Speaking of Sandys, whose admirable 
scriptural paraphrases ought to be better known than they 
are, he says, " He was a servant, but no slave, to his subject ; 
well knowing that a translator is a person in free custody ; 
custody, being bound to give the true sense of the author he 
translates ; free, left at liberty to clothe it in his own expres- 



Cicero and Quintilian, have speculated on the answer of Demosthenes, vrroKpicris, 
Delivery, Delivery, Delivery ! so few have ever adverted to the opinion of 
Libanius, that this reply was an ironical side-thrust at iEschiues ; an opinion 
which, if we are to interpret Demosthenes by himself, is rendered highly prob- 
able by the contemptuous sneers of the great orator at the ayab-h vrroKpio-is of 
his rival, the special point of excellence in which he was himself confessedly 
inferior to JEschines ? 

* Very judicious observations on the principles of translation will be found 
in Purvey's Prologue to his Translation of the Scriptures, (about A.D. 1388,) 
Wycliffite versions, I. 5*7. The general doctrine of Purvey is thus stated: 
" First it is to knowe, that the best translating is, out of Latyn into English, to 
translate aftir the sentence, and not oneli aftir the wordis, so that the sentence 
be as opin, either openere, in English as in Latyn, and go not fer fro the lettre ; 
and if the letter mai not be suid in the translating, let the sentence be ever hool 
and open, for the wordis owen to serue to the entent and sentence, and ellis the 
wordis ben superflu either false." Purvey exemplifies by many comparisons 
between the Latin and English idioms, which show a very good knowledge of 
the principles of English grammar. 

A friend of Lodge, who signs W. .K., expresses sound opinions on this sub 
ject, though not in the purest style, in a letter prefixed to the second edition of 
Lodge's Seneca, 1620. "You are his profitable Tutor," says he, "and have 
instructed him to walke and talke in perfect English. If his matter hold not 



TRUE AIM OF TRANSLATION. 601 

The rule often laid down, ' that in translating a foreign 
work into English, we are to adopt the same style and dic- 
tion which the author wonld have used had he been an Eng- 
lishman," is mistaken or inapplicable, because, except in 
matters of naked fact, or natural science, a foreigner, writing 
for foreigners, has a totally different set of ideas to express, 
and a totally different mode of conceiving similar ideas from 
those which an Englishman, writing on the same subject, 
would have, and therefore he would have written a different 
book. Had Goethe and Richter been born and trained in 
England, the one could never have produced a "Wilhelm 
Meister, or a Faust, the other never a Siebenkas or a Quin- 
tus Fixlein. Had Shakespeare been a Frenchman by birth 
and education, the world had never seen a Hamlet or a 
Henry IV. 

The true result to be aimed at, where we propose any 
thing beyond the communication of bare fact, is to produce 
upon the mind of the English reader, so far as possible, the 
same impression which the original author produced upon 

Btill the Roman characteristic, I should mistake him one of ours, he delivers his 
mind so significantly and fitly." 

"That ye have not parrot-like spoken his owne words, and lost yourselfe 
literally in a Latine Echo, rendering him precisely verbatim, as if tied to his 
tongue ; but retaining his Sence, have expressed his meaning in our proper 
English Elegancies and Phrase, is in a Translatour a discretion, &c, &c." 

In a series of discourses on the English language, discussions of the origin 
and meaning of particular words can hardly be out of place anywhere, and there- 
fore I shall be excused for here noticing a confusion of two English words ot 
Latin etymology, both of which occur in the foregoing extracts. - From the 
verb sentio, in its two acceptations, the Latins made the nouns sententia, 
opinion, meaning, and sensus, first, physical, afterwards, mental, perception. 
The Romans themselves, at last, confounded these two words. In Old-English, 
they were distinguished in form as well as meaning, for sentence in the time ol 
Purvey was the Latin sententia. In Lodge's time, sentence had become sence, 
and we now use sense for both purposes, sentence having acquired the meaning 
of period, or proposition, as well as that of a judicial decree. 



602 TRUE AIM OF TRANSLATION. 

the minds of those for whom he wrote. The rule 1 have jast 
condemned does not lead to the accomplishment of this aim, 
but, so far as it is practicable at all, its effect is to translate 
the author, not his work, to give an imitation, not a copy of 
the original ; whereas it is the characteristic of a perfect 
translation, that it, for the time, transforms the reader into 
the likeness of those for whom the story, the ballad, or the 
ode, was first said or sung.* 

The very supposition, that a genial writer could have 
acquired his special intellectual manhood in any but his 
native land, involves an absurdity, for it divests him of his 
nationality, which is as essentially a part of him as the fleshly 
organs, wherewith he takes into his being the world around 
him, and reproduces it to the consciousness or the imagina- 
tion of his readers. Shakespeare is often cited as an instance 
of genius too universal to bear the stamp of a national mint, 
and doubtless it is true that in him, more than in any- other 
name known in literature, the man predominated over tht 
citizen, but if we compare his works with whatever else 
modern humanity has produced, we shall find, if not positive 
internal evidence of his birthright, at least abundant negative 
proof, that in no land save England could that mighty imag- 



* It was upon this principle, that Sigurd, the Apostle of Sweden, in a sermon 
delivered about the beginning of the eleventh century, by an extravagant, but 
not unnatural license, substitutes cold for heat in threatening the unbeliever 
with the torments reserved for the wicked in a future state of existence. 

En grimmir guSniSingar * * skulu hraediligu gud~s or<5i bolvaSir vera ok 
utkasladir i ytri myrkr, par sem fyrir er frost ok tannagnastran. Forn. Sog. 
III. 168. 

And bold traitors to God * * shall be accursed by the terrible word ot 
God, and cast out into outer darkness, where is frost and gnashing of teeth. 

The imagination of the Northman, whose life was an almost perpetual shiver, 
would be more readily excited by the idea of suffering from cold, than of expo* 
sure to torment by fire, an element which to him was always a beneficent agent 



DIALECT OF TRANSLATIC ST. 603 

ination have assumed the form and proportions to which it 
grew. 

But though, the end to be songht in translation is simple 
enough, the means are neither obvious nor easy of command. 
There is, however, one principle generally not at all regarded, 
but which is nevertheless of great practical value in trans- 
ferring the productions of creative genius from their native 
to a foreign soil, in such a way that they shall yield the same 
fruit as in their original clime. It is this : we should choose 
for our translation the dialect of the period when our lan- 
guage was in a stage of development as nearly as possible 
corresponding to that of the tongue from which we translate. 
It seems to have been taken for granted that the dialect of 
the translator's own time is in all cases to be adopted, and 
by those who labor for the largest public perhaps it must be, 
but if the original be a work of true art, belonging to a period 
of widely different culture, it is as absurd to attempt to mod- 
ernize it in a foreign tongue, as in its own. English histor- 
ical literature furnishes a good illustration. The chronicles 
of Froissart were completed in the year 1400, memorable for 
the supposed death of Chaucer, a period when the French 
prose dialect was in a much more advanced stage of develop- 
ment than the English. The chronicle was translated by Lord 
Berners, as great a master of English as any writer of his 
time, in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, and again, 
by Johnes in the early part of the present century. Johnes's 
translation is executed with commendable fidelity, in a good 
modern English style, and is valuable as a repository of facts 
and dates, but its relation to Eroissart is that of a lithograph 
to a Titian, while Lord Berners, employing the diction of a 
period when English prose had advanced to a culture corre- 
sponding to that of the French of the preceding century, 



604 DIALECT OF TRANSLATION. 

and, as lie himself says, " not followynge his vuthor worde 
by worde, hut ensewing the true reporte of the sentence of 
the mater," gives you so perfect a repetition of the great 
chronicler, that you are quite unconscious whether you are 
reading French or English, and can scarcely resist the belief, 
that you are a contemporary of the fair dames and cavaliera 
of high emprize, whose adventures are portrayed with such 
wonderful felicity. 

The rule I have here laid down, though very general in 
its application, has, like most of the principles of literary 
composition, its exceptions. In the wide differences of cul- 
ture, of opinion, and of sentiment, which exist between dif- 
ferent nations, it may happen that a diction appropriate to 
the subject as viewed by those for whom a particular work 
of imaginative art is written, may be quite unsuited to the 
tastes and intellectual habits of a contemporaneous people, 
equally, though differently cultivated. In such cases a mas- 
ter of the art of translation will select the dialect best adapted 
to express to his public the conceptions of the author, though 
it may be that of another century much inferior in grammat- 
ical refinement. The fine ballad of Lenore by Burger, 
already quoted as an example of imitative felicity of sound, 
affords a good illustration. Tales of this sort are no longer 
current in England, and of course the modern dialect of that 
country has not been employed to embody them. They 
belong to earlier English literature, and they are far more 
effective, recited in the language employed when they were 
a part of a living mythology, than when clothed in the critr 
ical, sceptical, dress of a modern magazine. Taylor, there- 
fore, judged wisely in translating the ballad into the simpler 
dialect in which it would have been told and understood, 
when the superstitions of the middle ages, if they did not 



BALLAD OF LENOEE. 605 

form articles of religious belief, were still col stantly exciting 
the imaginations of the English people. I even doubt whether 
he has taken too great a license in carrying back the date of 
the story from the days of the Battle of Prague, an event 
unknown in English traditionary lore, to the more familiar 
age of the Lion-hearted Richard's crusade against the Pay- 
nim in the Holy Land. Compare these two stanzas of Tay- 
lor, in the English ballad verse, with a more literal version 
in the metre of the original : 

He went abroade with Richard's host 
The Paynim foes to quell ; 
But he no word to her had writt, 
An he were sick or well. 

* * * * 

She bet her breast and wrange her hands 
And rollde her tearlesse eye, 
From rise of morne till the pale stars 
Againe did fleck the sky. 

He'd gone with Fred'ric's host to wield 
The sword on Prague's dread battle-field ; 
Nor had he sent to tell 
If he were sick or well. 

* * * * 

She wrung her hands and beat her breast, 
Until the sun sank down to rest, 
'Till o'er the vaulted sphere 
The golden stars appear. 

The train of reasoning we have been pursuing suggests 
some observations, which I venture to propound at the risk 
of incurring the pains and penalties justly attached to the 
philological sin of neologism. I refer to a difference which, 
if it does not really exist, ought, I think, to exist in the Eng- 
lish use of the words idiom and idiotism. Both words are 
given in most English dictionaries, and both exist in the 
principal European languages, but I do not know that they 
have been anywhere very accurately discriminated, while 



606 IDIOMS AND IDIOTISMS. 

in English they are generally confounded. Grammatical 
writers, for the sake of varying the phrase and avoiding rep 
etition, sometimes employ idiom in a loose way as a synonym 
of language or dialect, but this is repugnant both to the ety- 
mology and the proper signification of the word. Idiom, is 
derived from the Greek adjective ISios, own, proper or pecu 
liar to, and in all its legitimate uses, retains the sense of 
peculiarity or speciality. Besides its lax and figurative use 
as a synonym of language or dialect, we employ it in three 
significations. 

First, to denote the general syntactical character which 
distinguishes the structure of a given language, or family of 
languages. 

Thus, when we speak of the idiom of French, or German, 
or Italian, we mean the assemblage of syntactical rules or 
forms, by which, without reference to the vocabulary, we 
recognize these languages respectively. If I were to trans- 
late, word for word, a page of French or German into Eng- 
lish, any person acquainted with those languages would 
know, at once, by the structure of the periods, from which 
of them I had taken it. The general characteristics by 
which he would detect the original, constitute what is called 
the idiom of the language, in the sense I am now consider- 
ing. For example, in most languages there are dhTererjt 
forms of the verb for the singular and plural numbers. Thus, 
in English, we say, he is, but they are ; is being used when 
the subject is in the third person singular, are when it is in 
the third person plural. Now, whatever may have been the 
origin of the distinctive forms of the verb, there exists in the 
language, as it is known to us, no reason why is, or any other 
form, should be appropriated to the singular, are, or any 
other form, to the plural. It is, in the present state of ety- 



IDIOMS AND DDIOTISMS. 607 

mology, an ultimate, or rather a purely conventional, gram- 
matical fact. A corresponding difference runs through 
almost all languages, and therefore, the rule, that the verb 
must agree with its nominative in number, is not an idiom 
or peculiarity of any of them. 

A similar general rule existed in Greek, and in Greek as 
in English, there was no assignable reason why the Greek 
io-TL, like the English corresponding verb is, should be re- 
stricted to the singular, and iitrt, like its English equivalent 
are, should be appropriated to the plural. It was altogether 
an arbitrary rule, but still a rule common to the Greek and 
most other European languages, and so, not a Greek idiom. 
But to this universal rule, Greek syntax made exceptions, 
the most familiar of which was, that if the plural nominative 
was of the neuter gender, then the verb was in the singular, 
and did not agree with its nominative. Thus they said, 6c 
av^pomoL ayaSot icaiv, the men are good, but ra /3i/3\ia 
aya$d eanv, the books is good. This was a general rule of 
the language, extending to all verbs, and all neuter nomina- 
tives, but it was not a law of universal grammar. It was a 
construction which characterized and individualized the 
Greek language, and, therefore, it was a peculiarity or idiom 
of that language. 

We use idiom, secondly, to denote an individual expres- 
sion, a form of speech applicable to a single phrase, which is 
contrary to the general syntax of the language, but yet suffi- 
ciently intelligible upon its face even to a foreigner. 

Thus if the substantive verb precede its nominative, so 
that to the hearer the number of the subject is undetermined 
when the verb is pronounced, the verb in Greek may be, in 
French generally must be, in the singular, though the nomi 
native be a masculine or feminine plural. Accordingly, 



608 IDIOMS AND IDIOTISMS. 

though we say in English, there are men and women, the 
French say, with the singular verb, il est (or il y a)des 
hommes et des femmes; there is men and women. This 
is a departure from the general usage of the Greek and 
French languages, properly applicable not to a whole class 
of words, as neuters at large, but only to the substantive verb, 
and those which represent it.* This peculiarity also is pop- 
ularly called an idiom, but it presents little difficulty, be- 
cause in expressions of this sort, notwithstanding the appa- 
rent want of concord between the verb and its subject, the 
meaning of the individual words would never fail to suggest 
the sense of the proposition. 

The poverty of language, the impossibility of inventing 
new words as fast as new ideas are brought into distinct con- 
sciousness, has obliged us to give to the word idiom a third 
sense. 

This is when we employ it to denote that class of linguis- 
tic anomalies, which teachers of languages and dictionaries 
call phrases or phraseological expressions. These are verbal 
combinations which contravene all rules, general and special, 
and the purport of which is wholly conventional, and cannot 
be gathered from the meaning of the several members that 
compose them. Examples of this are the French phrases, 
Jesuis amemedefairetelleoutellechose, I am in 
a position to do so and so, I am able to do so and so ; Je 
viens d'arriver, I have just arrived; and the thousand 
other arbitrary constructions in which the French language 
abounds. 

* Both the English and many other languages show a strong tendency to 
adopt this form of expression. The phrase there is with a plural nominative is 
sometimes used by speakers, who seldom violate the rules of concord in other 
cases ; and many examples of this construction can be found in the works ol 
Lord Bacon, Fuller, and other classical English writers. 



IDK MS AND IDIOTISMS. 609 

To these latter two linguistic forms the name „f idiotism 
has been sometimes, though so far as I know, not consist- 
ently applied, in both French and German, and we shall 
gain much in clearness of expression, if we adopt the distinc- 
tion. 

To recapitulate : Let us say that idiom may be employed 
loosely and figuratively as a synonym of language or dialect, 
but that, in its proper sense, it signifies the totality of the 
general rules of construction which characterize the syntax 
of a particular language and distinguish it from that of other 
tongues. Idiotism, on the other hand, should be taken to 
denote the systematic exemption of particular words, or com- 
binations of particular words, from the general syntactical 
rules of the language to which they belong, or in a more lim- 
ited sense, we may apply the same term to phrases not con- 
structed according to native etymology and syntax, and 
whose meaning is purely arbitrary and conventional, and 
then they would properly be styled special idiotisms. In a 
general way, the idiom of a language consists in those regu- 
lar and uniform laws of grammatical construction, which 
characterize its syntax ; its idiotisms are abnormal and indi- 
vidual departures not only from universal grammar, but 
from its own idiom. 

I have illustrated these distinctions by foreign examples, 
because the simplicity of English syntax renders its peculiar- 
ities less palpable, and, in general, its rules are little else 
than negative precepts, but there is room for the same dis- 
criminations in our own philology. For example, in Eng- 
lish, German, Swedish and Danish, the adjective regularly 
precedes, while in Italian and Spanish, it generally follows, 
the noun. It is the idiom of the language which determines 

the position. We say accordingly that the English idiom 
39 



610 IDIOMS AND IDIOTISMS. 

requires the adjective to precede the substantive, and this ia 
a rule which governs the construction in nearly all cases 
where that part of speech occurs, a rule distinguishing our 
syntax from that of the Spanish and Italian. So we have 
our idiotisms. For instance, the phrase, less common in 
American than in English books, the project took air y that is, 
was divulged. So, the use of help for refrain, as, I cannot 
help doing it, for I cannot refrain from doing it ; it turns out 
that so and so, for, it is now ascertained that, &c. 

There are sometimes curious, if not inexplicable, coinci- 
dences between the conventional idiotisms of different lan- 
guages. Thus, both in English and German we use to make 
over, in the sense of to transfer or convey the right of prop- 
erty ; as, A. made over to B. his house in Broadway. Here 
the proper signification of the verb furnishes no clew to the 
meaning of the phrase in either language. In general, how- 
ever, phrases of this conventional sort are peculiar to a single 
language, and without literal equivalents in others. 

The difficulty of translation does not lie in mere idiomatic 
differences, for the expression ' a beautiful woman ' is the 
precise equivalent of fern in a formosa, though the relative 
positions of the noun and the adjective are reversed, nor can 
the subtlest intellect discern any difference between the 
English, ' there are birds without wings,' and the French, il 
est, or, il y a, des oiseaux sans ailes. In these in- 
stances, notwithstanding the difference of position in one 
case, and of number and case (des oiseaux being strictly 
a gen tive) in the other, we may say the translation is lit- 
eral ; and even in those special idiotisms whose meaning is 
conventional, we may generally find logical equivalents in 
all languages of the same degree of culture, though the form 
of phrase may be very different. If I translate je viens 



SOME WORDS UNTRANSLATABLE. 611 

d'ai\ iver by, I come from to arrive, I utter nonsense, but 
if I say, I have just arrived, I convey the precise import of 
the French phrase, though no one word in the translation, 
but the pronoun, grammatically corresponds to any word in 
the original. 

But, in spite of the increasing capacity and flexibility of 
language, and the linguistic attainments and dexterity of 
modern translators, every genial idiomatic work will have 
peculiarities and felicities of expression, which cannot ade- 
quately be rendered into any other form. Thought, in every 
speech, has its ideas which admit of but one mode of utter- 
ance, and it is impossible to translate such expressions either 
into other terms of the same tongue, or into the native words 
of another. In any two languages there are, to use a mathe- 
matical phrase, many incommensurable quantities, many 
words in each untranslatable into the other, nor is it always 
possible by any periphrase to supply an equivalent. Of this 
untranslatability of single words, simple and compound, Ger- 
man offers us many examples. Take the verb ahnen and 
its derivative noun Ahnung: "We use for them suspect 
and suspicion, presentiment, foreboding, anticipation, but 
yet in most cases these words fall far short of expressing the 
precise meaning of the original ; and in compounds, the famil- 
iar and readily intelligible participial adjective entseelt 
has no better correspondent than the unEnglish exanimated ; 
and of the numerous words formed with the prefix n a c h, as 
the verbs and verbal nouns, nachwehen, nachleben, 
few can be adequately translated by English compounds. 

But, on the other hand, in spite of the affluence of German 
in radicals, and its great flexibility and facility in derivation 
unci composition, it yet wants legions of words lo embodj 



612 FOKEIGN WOKDS IN GERMAN. 

ideas familiar to the mind, and well expressed by the tongue, 
of other peoples. Heyse's Dictionary of foreign terms used 
in German contains not less than forty thousand words, and 
if we deduct from these the proper, and purely local names, 
and those for which substitutes have recently been formed 
from native roots, the great number that still remains proves, 
that even the Teutonic speech, affluent as it is in words, is 
yet too poor to live without borrowing largely from foreign 
stores, and, of course, that it cannot, by simple translation 
into the domestic vocabulary, appropriate to itself, and nat- 
uralize all the products of alien genius. 

As I have elsewhere remarked, it is said to be a charac- 
teristic of a perfect style that you can neither add, subtract, 
exchange, nor transpose a single word in a period, without 
injury to the sense. If this be so, how great must be the 
difficulty of fairly translating a sentence, where not only 
must every word be changed, but where, from the difference 
in grammar and syntax, the number and arrangement of the 
words must vary in every member of the period. But, the 
impracticability of making a perfect translation lies less in 
the want of corresponding phrases and idioms in different 
languages, than in the impossibility of transferring to foreign 
words the associations that cluster around the native voca- 
bles which they attempt to represent. Of this difficulty our 
English words gentleman, home, comfort, are instances. 
Not that every European country does not possess men of 
truth, courage, honor, generosity, refinement, and elegance 
of conventional manners — the Castilian felt that the Arab 
had all this, when he said that his Moslem enemy was an 
hidalgo, a gentleman, though a Moor; — not that Conti- 
nental Europe knows nothing of the pious attractions of the 



QUALIFICATIONS OF TRANSLATOR. 613 

fireside and the family circle ; not that ; t>nvenience, and lux- 
ury, and taste, are wanting to the dwellings of the wealthy 
in Germany, in Italy, and in France ; but it was in England 
that the ideal of social grace and moral excellence in man, as 
attributes of humanity superior in worth to the artificial 
cairns of rank and conventional manner, was first conceived, 
named, and realized ; it was in England that the necessities 
of a rude climate, and the facilities afforded by wealth and a 
widely-extended commerce, at once occasioned and made 
possible that consummation of moral and physical domestic 
enjoyment, which is implied in the phrase ' the comforts of 
an English home? This sacred trio, then, the three talis- 
manic words, which, next to those still more immediately 
belonging to the religious, the conjugal, the filial, and the 
paternal ties, are the first in the Anglican vocabulary of 
the heart, are hallowed by older memories, gilded by 
brighter and more venerable associations, than the corre- 
sponding terms in other languages ; and hence it is that their 
claims have been so generally recognized as to secure their 
adoption, as words essentially untranslatable, into almost 
every European tongue. 

From these considerations, it is obvious that the art of 
translation is not an ordinary craft, requiring for its skilful 
exercise no other qualification than a familiarity with the 
dictionary and grammar of the tongues between which a 
version is to be made. It demands, further, an intimate, 
homelike acquaintance with the national characters, habits, 
and associations connected with both languages, and espe- 
cially such a complete command of all the resources of the 
translator's own, as is found only in combination with the 
ability to conceive and produce, as well as to transplant. 



614: PARAPHRASE AND METAPHRASE. 

Few good translations have been made, except by persons 
themselves distinguished as able writers ; and, especially with 
reference to the poetical dialect, there is no better school of 
preparatory practice than the making of careful translations 
from authors eminent for originality of thought, as well as 
power of words. 

The ancient rhetorical instructors advised their pupils to 
practise what was called paraphrase when applied to prose, 
and metaphrase with reference to poetry. They consist alike 
in translating, if I may thus use the word, the master-pieces 
of great writers into other words in the same language, as 
our Franklin did with Addison. Cicero, speaking in the 
person of Crassus, condemns the practice, on the ground that 
the original author must be taken to have employed the apt- 
est words and syntax to express his thoughts, and that the 
pupil would necessarily acquire an inferior style, by attempt- 
ing to clothe them in a different dress. Quintilian, however, 
defends paraphrase and metaphrase as useful, and will not 
admit the Latin language to be so poor that the same thing 
may not be excellently said in more than one form of ex- 
pression. Franklin added the converse of paraphase, which 
I do not know that the ancients practised. He laid aside his 
version until he had forgotten the phraseology of the orig- 
inal, and then turned it back again, with as close a conformity 
to Addison's style as he was able to command. Translations 
from foreign languages are free from the objection which 
Cicero urges against paraphrase in the same ; and, in com- 
pelling a close examination of the precise meaning of the 
original, and aiding in attaining to a command over the vo- 
cabulary of tur own tongue, their advantages are equally 
great Asa means of acquiring a knowledge of foreign Ian- 



PRACTICE OF TRANSLATION. 615 

guages, translation, combined with retranslation, is, I believe, 
the very best of exercises, except actual and extensive daily 
practice in speaking. It was by this method, chiefly, that 
Queen Elizabeth became so good a classical scholar. Roger 
Ascham, her tutor, says : " After the first declining of a 
nowne and a verbe, she never toke yet Greeke nor Latin 
grammar in her hand ; but only by double translating of 
Demosthenes and Isocrates, dailie, without missing, every 
forenone, and likewise some part of Tullie every afternone, 
for the space of a yeare or two, hath atteyned to soch a perfit 
understanding in both the tonges, and to such a readie utter- 
ance of the Latin, and that with such a judgement,, as they 
be fewe in nomber in both the Universities, or els where hi 
Englande, that be in both tonges, comparable with her ma- 
jestic" We may be permitted to doubt whether Ascham's 
account of the progress of his royal pupil is not a little over- 
charged ; but, in any event, it indicates an industry and a 
perseverance not common in personages of so exalted a rank, 
in any age or country. 

As a means of acquiring a ready and wide command of 
our native speech, the practice of extemporaneous translation, 
of reading off into English a book or a newspaper in a for- 
eign language, is perhaps the very best, except the habit of 
extemporaneous speaking and constant social intercourse 
with different classes in life. But translation has an im 
portaut advantage over mere vernacular practice. Men who 
speak much, having only theii own thoughts to express, 
frame for themselves a comparatively narrow vocabulary and 
syntax, and acquire a wearisome mannerism of style, from 
which they seldom succeed in emancipating themselves. If 
we listen often to a particular speaker, we rarely fail to 



616 PRACTICE OF TRANSLATION. 

notice that he has not only his pet words, but a set of exple- 
tives, stereotyped phrases, and favorite maxims, which he 
mechanically throws in, in the same way, and much for the 
same purpose, as the popular bards hummed, at the end of 
every stanza, a burden, while summoning their memory or 
their invention to help them out with the next verse. The 
practice of extemporaneous translation forces us into new 
trains of thought, demanding new forms of phrase ; lifts us 
out of the rut (to use an expressive colloquialism), and confers 
the power of readily calling up familiar or less habitual 
words and combinations ; thus both enlarging our effective 
vocabulary, and securing us against contracting a restricted 
personal dialect, which is not only repulsive to our hearers, 
but which reacts injuriously on our own originality and 
variety of thought.* 

* Dr. Johnson complains of translations from foreign literatures, as one of 
the most fertile sources of corruption in language. I doubt whether English 
has suffered much from this cause ; and, on the other hand, the attempts at a 
strict literal rendering of the original text in English, from the time of Hereford 
to the present day, have enriched both our vocabulary and our syntax with 
many words and combinations, which we could ill afford to dispense with. Indeed, 
so far from introducing an extravagant number of foreign words and phrases, 
translation has led to the formation of many happy native compounds and 
derivatives, which would hardly have been struck out, except in the search for 
vernacular equivalents of foreign expressions. 



LECTURE XXVIU. 

THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

The revised version of the Bible, now in general use 
wherever the English tongue is spoken, was executed by 
order of King James I., and was completed and published in 
the year 1611. 

Its relations to the English language are, for a variety of 
reasons, more important than those of any other volume ; 
and it may be said, with no less truth, that no Continental 
translation has occupied an equally influential position in the 
philology and the literature of the language to which it be- 
longs. The English Bible has been more universally read, 
more familiarly known and understood, by those who use its 
speech, than any other version, old or new. In the sixteenth 
century, the English people was more generally and more 
thoroughly protestantized than any other nation, and, of 
course, among them the Bible had a freer and more diffused 
circulation than it had ever attained elsewhere ; for though, 
in individual Gorman States, the reformed religion soon be- 
came the exclusive faith of the people, yet those States 
formed but a portion of the Germanic nation. Although, 
therefore, the philological as well as the religious influence 



618 FKEE DISCUSSION IN ENGLAND. 

of Luther's translation was very great, yet it only indirectly 
and incidentally affected the speech of that great multitude 
of Teutons who neither accepted the creed of Luther, nor 
made use of his version. 

Again : the discussion of the principles of the Reformation 
and of their collateral results, as a living practical question, 
connected not only with men's hopes of a future life, but, 
through civil government, with their dearest interests in this, 
was longer continued in England than in any other European 
State. The puritan movement kept the debate alive in Great 
Britain long after the wordy war was ended, and men had 
resorted to the last argument of Kings, in the Continental 
nations. From the year 1611, the Bible in King James's 
version was generally appealed to as the last resort in all 
fundamental questions both of church and state ; for even 
those Protestant denominations, which gave the greatest 
weight to tradition, allowed the paramount authority of Scrip- 
ture, and admitted that traditions irreconcilable with the 
words of that volume, were not of binding force. From the 
accession of Elizabeth, therefore, and more especially from 
that of James, until the Acts of Uniformity, early in the reign 
of Charles II., for a time extinguished the religious liberties 
of England, the theological and political questions, which 
most concerned man's interests in this world and his happi- 
ness in that which is to come, were perpetually presented 
to every thinking Englishman, as points which he not only 
might, but must, decide for himself at his peril, and that by 
lights drawn, directly or indirectly, from the one source of 
instruction to which all appealed as the final arbiter. For 
these reasons, the Bible became known to the mind, and 
incorporated into the heart and the speech, of the Anglican 
people to a greater extent than any other book ever entered 



619 

into the life of man, with the possible exception of the He- 
brew Scriptures, the Homeric poems, and the Arabic Koran. 

Although particular points in the authorized version 
were objected to by the more zealous partisans on both sides 
of the controversy respectively, and though the English 
Prayer-Book continued to employ an older translation in the 
passages of scripture introduced into that ritual, yet the new 
revision commended itself so generally to the sound judg- 
ment of all parties, that in a generation or two, it superseded 
all others, and has now, for more than two centuries, main- 
tained its position as an oracular expression of religious 
truth, and at the same time as the first classic of our litera- 
ture — the highest exemplar of purity and beauty of language 
existing in our speech. 

Those who assent to the views which have been so often 
expressed in these lectures, respecting the reciprocal relations 
between words, individual or combined, and mental action, 
will admit that the influence, not of Christian doctrine alone, 
but of the verbal form in which that doctrine has been em- 
bodied, upon the intellectual character of the Anglican peo- 
ple, can hardly be over-estimated. Modern philologists, 
Europeans even, have not been the first to discover the close 
relation which subsists between formulas, the ipsissima verba 
of the apostle, and the faith he proclaims. The believing 
Jew reads the Pentateuch not only in its original tongue, 
but, as he supposes, in a form approximating to the very 
inflectional and accentual utterance with which its revela- 
tions fell from the lips of Moses ; and the pious Moslem 
allows no translation, no modernization, of the precepts of the 
Prophet, but contends that the inspired words of the Koran 
nave survived, unchanged, the lapse of twelve centuries, 
There is little doubt that the immutability of form in th6 



620 MODERN RELIGIOUS DIALECT. 

sacred codes of these nations is one of the most important 
among the causes which have given their religions such a 
rooted, tenacious hold upon the minds and hearts of those 
who profess them ; and the same remark applies, with almost 
equal force, to the modern Greeks, who, in their religious ser- 
vices, employ the original text, and to the Armenians, who 
use a very ancient translation of the !N~ew Testament. In 
like manner, the strict adherer) ce of the Popish church to the 
Vulgate, and to ancient forms of speech, in all the religious 
uses of language, is one of the great elements of strength on 
which the Papacy relies. 

The Hehrew and the Arab, the Brahmin and the Budd- 
hist, the Oriental and the Latin Christian, inherit, with the 
blood of their ancestors, if not precisely the popular speech, 
at least the sacred dialect of their legislators and their proph- 
ets ; but the Greek and Latin languages were too remote 
from the speech of the Gothic nations, to have ever served as 
a vehicle for imparting popular instruction of any sort among 
those tribes. Hence, the earliest missionaries to the Ger- 
manic and Scandinavian nations learned to address them in 
the vernacular tongue : portions, more or less complete, of the 
Scriptures, and of other religious books, were very early 
translated into the Northern dialects ; and every man, who 
adopted Christianity and the culture which everywhere ac- 
companied it, imbibed its precepts through the accents of his 
own particular maternal speech. Accordingly, though Eng- 
lish Protestantism has long had its one unchanged standard 
of faith, common to all who use the English speech, yet 
Protestant Christianity r , from the number and diversity of 
the languages it embraces, has no such point of union, no 
common formulas ; and this is one of the reasons why tha 



ENGLISH BIBLE AND LITERATURE. 621 

English people, with all their nominal divisions, and multi- 
tudinous visible organizations, have not split up into such a 
wide variety, and so extreme a range of actual opinion, as 
the Protestants of the Continent. Whatever theories, there- 
fore, may be entertained respecting the evils of a rigorous 
national conformity to particular symbols — whatever views 
may be held with regard to the growth, progress and fluc- 
tuations of language — both the theologian and the philologist 
will admit, that a certain degree of permanence in the stand- 
ards of religious faith and of grammatical propriety is de- 
sirable. The authorized version of the Bible satisfies this 
reasonable conservatism on both points ; and it is, therefore, a 
matter of much literary as well as religious interest, that it 
should remain intact, so long as it continues able to discharge 
the functions which have been appointed to it as a spiritual 
and a philological instructor. 

I do not propose any inquiry into its fidelity, simply as a 
presentation of the doctrinal precepts of Christianity, both 
because such a discussion would here be inappropriate, and 
because the general accuracy of the version is so well estab- 
lished, that it is hardly questioned by those who are most 
zealous for a revision of its dialect. Its relations to our lit- 
erature and the social and moral interests of the Anglican 
family, considered simply as a composition, are, however, a 
subject well worthy of examination. In the first place, then, 
the dialect of this translation was not, at the time of the 
revision, or, indeed, at any other period, the actual current 
book-language, nor the colloquial speech of the English peo- 
ple. This is a point of much importance, because the con- 
trary opinion has been almost universally taken for granted ; 
and hence very mistaken views have been, and still are, 



622 

entertained respecting the true relations of the diction of that 
version to the national tongue. It was an assemblage of the s 
best forms of expression applicable to the communication 
of religious truth that then existed, or had existed in any and 
all the successive stages through which English had passed 
in its entire history. Fuller, indeed, informs us that when a 
boy, he was told by a day-laborer of Northampton shire, that 
the version in question agreed nearly with the dialect of his 
county ; but, though it may have more closely resembled the 
language of that shire, and though it certainly most nearly 
approximated to the popular speech in those parts of the 
realm where English was best spoken, yet, when it appeared, 
it was by no means regarded as an embodiment of the every- 
day language of the time. On the contrary, its archaisms, 
its rejection of the Latinisms of the Rhemish Romanist ver- 
sion, and its elevation above the vulgarisms of the market 
and the kitchen, were assailed by the same objections which 
are urged against it at the present moment. 

The position of the revisers and of their public was entirely 
different from that of Luther and the German people, when 
the great Reformer undertook the task of giving his country- 
men the Bible in their own tongue ; and, accordingly, very 
different principles were properly adopted by the German 
and the English translators. German bibles indeed existed 
before Luther, but they were too strongly marked with dia- 
lectic peculiarities — too incorrect and too much tinctured with 
Romish opinion — to serve even as the foundation of a revision ; 
and they had not been widely enough circulated to have dif- 
fused among the people any familiar acquaintance with the 
contents of the sacred volume. The aim of Luther was to 
give to the high and the low of the Teutonic race access to 



luther's translation". 623 

thft authority on which he based his doctrines, in a form for 
the rirst time generally intelligible, and scrupulously faithiu] 
to the original text. He had before him no repository of a 
sacred, and yet universally understood, phraseology ; and, as a 
teacher of the people, he could only make himself compre- 
hended by using the dialect, which was the familiar every- 
day speech of the largest portion of the people of his native 
land. Hence, as he says himself, he composed the phraseolo- 
gy he adopted, out of the living vocabulary, which he heard 
employed around him in the street, the market, the field and 
the workshop, and formed a diction out of elements common 
to the speech of the whole Germanic race. The translation 
of Luther was, no doubt, most readily intelligible in the prov- 
inces where he had acquired his own vernacular ; but it was 
so thoroughly idiomatic, so penetrated with the fundamental 
spirit of the Teutonic speech, that it soon obtained a wide 
circulation, and was easily understood in provinces whose 
popular dialect appeared to be very discrepant from that of 
Luther. Low-German retranslations of this version, indeed, 
were published, but they did not long continue in use ; and 
for nearly three centuries Luther's text has been the only one 
employed in religious teaching in Protestant Germany, how- 
ever widely the local speech may differ from it. To secure 
its first introduction to masses ignorant of the Bible and 
without a consecrated dialect, it was necessary that it should 
be clothed in words most readily intelligible to those whom 
Luther desired to reach ; but, that extreme familiarity of 
diction is not a permanent necessity in religious instruction, is 
shown by the fact that that version, and with it the High- 
German dialect, have become almost the sole vehicle for the 



624: THE BIBLE AND THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 

dissemination of Protestant Christianity wherever any branch 
of the Teutonic tongue is spoken. 

Not only is the High-German translation universally 
read, but, with few exceptions, pulpit and catechetical in 
struction is conveyed in High-German throughout the Platt- 
Deutsch or Low-German provinces ; and we learn from Kohl, 
that even in the Frisic districts, where classical German is 
almost a foreign tongue, the peasantry both comprehend the 
High-German of their pastors, and habitually employ its 
vocabulary themselves in relation to all religious topics, 
though not able to converse in it fluently on other subjects. 

The translators, or rather the revisers, of the English 
Bible of 1611 and the British people stood, as I have said, 
in a totally different relation to each other. These trans- 
lators were not the teachers of a new doctrine : the public 
they addressed were not neophytes or strangers to the con- 
tents or the phraseology of the volume now again to be 
spread before them. England had been Protestant, already, 
for almost three-fourths of a century ; and there were com- 
paratively few of the English people who had not been 
taught the precepts of that faith, and made familiar with its 
oracles in their very cradle, through the translations of Tyn- 
dale, Coverdale and others, which were made the basis, arid 
furnished the staple, of the new recension. Hence the doc- 
trines and the diction of the New Testament, which they 
found nearly unchanged in that recension, had become 
almost a part of their very consciousness ; and there was no 
occasion to exchange, for a more common or a more artificial 
speech, the forms of words in which they had already learned 
whatever of most sacred Protestantism and the Protestant 
Bible had to teach. Wycliffe and his school in the four- 



625 

teenth, Tyndale early in the sixteenth, Coverdale, Cranmer, 
the Genevan, and other translators at a later period in the 
same century, had gradually built up a consecrated diction, 
which, though not, as it certainly was not, composed of a vul- 
gar vocabulary, was, nevertheless, in that religious age, as 
perfectly intelligible to every English protestant as the words 
of the nursery and the fireside. 

In fact, with here and there an exception, the difference 
between Tyndale's New Testament and that of 1611, is 
scarcely greater than is found between any two manuscript 
copies of most modern works which have undergone frequent 
transcription ; and Tyndale's, Coverdale's, Cranmer's, the 
Bishops', the Genevan, and the standard version, coincide so 
nearly with each other, both in sense and in phraseology, 
that we may hear whole chapters of any of them read with- 
out noticing that they deviate from the text to which we 
have always been accustomed. "When, then, we study our 
Testaments, we are in most cases perusing the identical words 
penned by the martyr Tyndale, nearly three hundred and 
fifty years ago ; and hitherto the language of English prot- 
estant faith and doctrine may fairly be said to have under- 
gone no change. 

I remarked that the dialect of the authorized version was 
not the popular English of the time, but simply a revision of 
older translations. It is almost equally true, that the diction 
of Wycliffe and of Tyndale was not that of the secular lit- 
erature of their times. The language of Wycliffe's Testa- 
ment differs nearly as much from even the religious prose 
writings of his contemporary and follower, Chaucer, as does 
that of our own Bible from the best models of literary com- 
position in the present day : and it is a still more remarkable 
40 



626 

and important fact, that the style, which Wycliffe himself 
employs in his controversial and other original works, is a 
very different one from that in which he clothed his transla- 
tion. This circumstance seems to give some countenance to 
the declaration of Sir Thomas More, otherwise improbable, 
that there existed English Bibles long before "Wycliffe ; and 
hence we might suppose that his labors and those of his 
school were confined to the revision of still earlier versions. 
But although English paraphrases, mostly metrical, of differ- 
ent parts of the Bible were executed at the very commence- 
ment of our literature, yet there is no sufficient ground to 
believe that there were any prose translations of such extent 
and fidelity as to serve for a basis of revision ; and the oldest 
known complete translation of the Old Testament, the earlier 
text in the late Oxford edition of the Wycliffe versions, has 
very much the aspect of a first essay. 

This, down to the twentieth verse of the third chapter of 
Baruch, is believed to have been the work of Nicolas de 
Hereford, a coadjutor of Wycliffe — the remainder of the Old 
Testament, and the whole of the New having been, as there 
is good cause to believe, translated by Wycliffe himself.* 
Purvey's recension, executed very soon after, is a great im- 
provement upon Hereford, who closely followed the Latin- 
isms of the Vulgate ; but Purvey founded his diction upon 
that of Wycliffe, and the philological difference between the 
two is by no means important. 

* The preface to the Oxford edition of the Wycliffite versions very satisfac- 
torily disposes of most of the questions connected with the authorship of the 
different translations which appeared in the fourteenth century, though the 
internal evidence in support of the opinion, which ascribes to Wycliffe the com- 
pletion of Hereford's translation of the Old Testament does not seem to me very 
conclusive. Much information on the translations of tne sixteenth century will 
be found in the Historical Account prefixed tc f^oE+e^o Hexapl* London, 
1841, and the authorities there referred to. 



WTCLIFFE A^D TYNDALE. 627 

The difference between the version of Wycliffe and thai 
of Tyndale was occasioned partly by the change of the lan- 
guage in the course of two centuries, and partly by the dif- 
ference of the texts from which they translated ; and from 
these two causes, the discrepancies between the two versions 
are much greater than those between Tyndale's, which was 
completed in 1526, and the standard version which appeared 
only eighty-five years later. But, nevertheless, the influence 
of Wycliffe upon Tyndale is too palpable to be mistaken, 
and it cannot be disguised by the grammatical differences, 
which are the most important points of discrepancy between 
them. If we reduce the orthography of both to the same 
standard, conform the inflections of the fourteenth to those 
of the sixteenth century, and make the other changes which 
would suggest themselves to an Englishman translating from 
the Greek instead of from the Yulgate, we shall find a much 
greater resemblance between the two versions than a similar 
process would produce between secular authors of the periods 
to which they respectively belong. Tyndale is merely a full- 
grown Wycliffe, and his recension of the New Testament is 
just what his great predecessor would have made it, had he 
awaked again to see the dawn of that glorious day, of which 
his own life and labors kindled the morning twilight. Not 
only does Tyndale retain the general grammatical structure 
of the older version, but most of its felicitous verbal combi- 
nations, and, what is more remarkable, he preserves even the 
rhythmic flow of its periods, which is again repeated in the 
recension of 1611. Wycliffe, then, must be considered as 
having originated the diction and phraseology, which for five 
centuries has constituted the consecrated dialect of the Eng- 
lish speech ; and Tyndale as having given to it that finish 
and perfection, which have so admirably adapted it to the 



628 

expression of religions doctrine and sentiment, and to the 
narration of the remarkable series of historical facts which 
are recorded in the Christian Scriptures.* If we compare 
Tyndale's New Testament with the works of his contempo- 
raries, Lord Berners and Sir Thomas More, or the authorized 
version with the prose of Shakespeare, and Kaleigh, and 
J3acon, or other writers of the same date, we shall find very 
nearly, if not quite, as great a difference in all the essentials 
of their diction, as between the authorized version and the 
best written narratives or theological discussions of the pres- 
ent day. But, in spite of this diversity, the language of the 
authorized translation, as a religious dialect, is and always 
has been very familiar to the English people ; and I do not 
hesitate to avow my conviction that if any body of scholars, 
of competent Greek and Hebrew learning, were now to 
undertake, not a revision of the existing version, but a new 
translation founded on the principle of employing the current 
phraseology of the day, it would be found much less intelli- 
gible to the mass of English-speaking people than the stand- 
ard version at this moment is. If the Bible is less understood 
than it was at earlier periods, which I by no means believe, 
it is because it is less studied ; and the true remedy is, not to 
lower its tone to a debased standard of intelligence, but to 
educate the understandings of the Anglican people up to the 



* The first of the Rules prescribed to the revisers by King James was this : 
" The ordinary Bible read in the Church, commonly called the Bishops' Bible, 
to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit." The fourteenth 
Rule was : " These Translations to be used, when they agree better with the 
text than the Bishops' Bible, viz., Tyndale's, Matthew's, Coverdale's, Whit- 
church, Geneva." Fuller, Church Hist., book x., sec. iii. § 1. 

But the Bishops' Bible, and, indeed, all the others named, were founded upon 
Tyndale ; and, especially in point of general diction, depart very little from hii 
rendering. 



ENGLISH SACKED DIALECT. 629 

comprehension of the purest and most idiomatic forms of 
expression which belong to their mother tongue. 

The general result of a comparison between the diction 
of the English Bible and that of the secular literature of Eng- 
land is, that we have had, from the very dawn of our litera- 
ture, a sacred and a profane dialect, the former eminently 
native, idiomatic, vernacular, and permanent, the latter com- 
posite, heterogeneous, irregular, and fluctuating ; the one 
pure, natural, and expressive, the other mixed, and compar- 
atively distorted and conventional. 

It is unfortunate that the unwise economy, which has 
been too often observed in reprinting the scriptures, should 
have, in the common editions, omitted the Translators' Ad- 
dress to the Reader ; though it must be allowed that that 
address by no means acknowledges the full extent of the 
obligations which the revisers were under to earlier laborers 
in the same field. The reason of this silence was that the 
older translations were in every man's hands, and the fact 
that the new edition was but an adaptation of them was too 
notorious to need to be stated in detail ; but it is nevertheless 
singular, that not one of the former English versions should 
have been referred to by name. The revisers content them- 
selves with this general statement : " We never thought from 
the beginning, that we should need to make a new transla- 
tion, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, but to make a 
good one better, or out of many good ones one principal good 
one, not j ustly to be excepted against ; that hath beene our 
endeavor, that our marke." And most successful were they 
in attaining to that mark, in embodying in their revision the 
result of the labors of many generations, and of hundreds of 
scholars, and in making it a summing up of the linguistic 
equations solved in three centuries of Biblical exposition, an 



630 DIALECT OF BIBLE SPECIALITY. 

anthology of all the beauties developed in the lan^age dur 
ing its whole historical existence. 

Such is the general history and character of the received 
version. But what are its relations past and present to the 
language, of which it is the purest and most beautiful exam- 
ple ? I have said its diction was not the colloquial or lit- 
erary dialect of any period of the English language. It is 
even now scarcely further removed from the current phrase- 
ology of life and of books than it was two hundred years 
since. The subsequent movement of the English speech has 
not been in a right line of recession from the scriptural dia- 
lect. It has been rather a curve of revolution around it. 
Were it not carrying the metaphor too far, I would say it is 
an elliptical curve, and that the speech of England has now 
been brought by it much nearer to that great solar centre, 
that focus of genial warmth and cheerful light, than it was 
a century ago, when hundreds of words in its vocabulary, 
now as familiar as the alphabet, were complained of as 
strange or obsolete.* In fact the English Bible sustains, and 

* In Lecture XII., p. 263, I remarked that scarcely two hundred words 
occurring in the English Bible were obsolete. 

In examining the vocabulary for the purpose of making that estimate, I used 
a Concordance which did not extend to the Apocrypha, and the remark should 
have been limited accordingly. Booker's Scripture and Prayer-book Glossary, 
which I was not able to consult before p. 263 was printed, contains, besides 
phraseological combinations, about three hundred and eighty -eight words and 
senses of words, alleged to be obsolete. Of these, more than one hundred belong 
to the Apocrypha and the Prayer-book, and among the remainder, there are not 
less than thirty, such as, loth, whit, stuff, fret, beeves, haft, with, maul, (as a 
noun,) summer, (as a verb,) &c, which in the United States are as familiarly 
understood, in their scriptural senses, as any words in the language. We may 
therefore, take the number of Bible words and special meanings now so far 
obsolete in this country that other words are habitually used instead of them, at 
about two hundred and fifty. But of these, many are of familiar etymology or 
composition, and therefore, though disused, readily intelligible, and others are 
well understood, because they are used in other books still very generally read ; 
so that the number which there is any sufficient reason to regard as really fo* 
gotten, does not probably exceed nw estimate. 



PERMANENCE OF SCRIPTURE. 631 

always has sustained to the general Anglican tongre, the 
position of a treatise upon a special knowledge requiring, 
like any branch of science, a special nomenclature and 
phraseology. The language of the law, for example, in both 
vocabulary and structure, differs widely from that of unpro- 
fessional life ; the language of medicine, of metaphysics, of 
astronomy, of chemistry, of mechanical art, all these have 
their appropriate idioms, very diverse from the speech which 
is the common heritage of all. Why, then, should theology, 
the highest of knowledges, alone be required to file her 
tongue to the vulgar utterance, when every other human 
interest has its own appropriate expression, which no man 
thinks of conforming to a standard, that, because it is too 
common, can hardly be other than unclean ? 

There is one important distinction between the dialect of 
the scriptures, considered as an exposition of a theology, and 
that of a science or profession. The sciences, all secular 
knowledges, in fact, are mutable and progressive, and of 
course, as they change and advance, their nomenclature 
must vary in the same proportion. The doctrine of the 
Bible, on the other hand, is a thing fixed and unchangeable, 
and when it has once found a fitting expression in the words 
of a given language, there is in general no reason why those 
words should not continue to be used, so long as the lan- 
guage of which they form a part continues to exist. There 
are many words in the English Bible which are strictly tech- 
nical, and never were employed as a part of the common 
dialect, or for any other purpose than the particular use to 
which they are consecrated in that volume ; there are others 
which belong both to the appropriate expression of religious 
doctrine, and to the speech of common life, and of these lat- 
ter, some very few have become obsolete, so far is their pop 



632 DIALECT OF BIBLE SPECIALITY, 

ular, every-day use is concerned; but they still retain in 
religious phraseology the signification they possessed when 
introduced into the English translation. 

Now the same thing is true with reference to all other 
knowledges which possess special nomenclatures. There are 
in law, medicine, chemistry, the mechanic arts, many words 
always exclusively appropriated to the service of those arts ; 
others, once familiar and common, but which no longer form 
a part of the general vocabulary of the language, and which 
are at present restricted to scientific and professional use ; 
and here the phraseology of the scriptures, and that of other 
special studies, stand in precisely the same relations to the 
common language of the people. Each has, and always 
must have, a special dialect, because it is a speciality itself, 
and has numerous ideas not common to any other depart- 
ment of human thought and action. And not only is this 
true of the language of science, and of art, but of the dialect 
which belongs to all the higher workings of the intellect. 
No man acquainted with both literature and life supposes 
that the speech of the personages of Shakespeare's tragedies, 
or of the actors in Milton's great epic, was the actual collo- 
quial phraseology of their times ; and it is as absurd to object 
to the language of the scriptures, because it is not the lan- 
guage of the street, as to criticise Shakespeare and Milton, 
because their human and superhuman heroes speak in the 
artificial dialect of poetry, and not in the tones of vulgar 
humanity. 

To attempt a new translation of the Bible, in the hope of 
finding within the compass of the English language a clearer, 
a more appropriate, or a more forcible diction than that of the 
standard version, is to betray an ignorance of the capabilities 
of our native speech, with which it would be in vain to rea- 



NEW TESTAMENT GREEK AND ENGLISH. 633 

son, and I suppose no scholars, whose opinions are entitled 
to respect, seriously propose any thing beyond a revision, 
which should limit itself to the correction of ascertained 
errors, the introduction of greater uniformity of expression; 
and the substitution of modern words for such as have be- 
come either obsolete, or so changed in meaning as to convey 
to the unlearned a mistaken impression. 

The most general objection to any present attempt at 
revision has been well stated by Trench, namely : that " we 
are not as yet in any respect prepared for it ; the Greek and 
the English which should enable us to bring this to a suc- 
cessful end, might, it is to be feared, be wanting alike." In 
fact I doubt whether any impartial scholar has ever examined 
any of the modern attempts at revision, without finding more 
changes for the worse than for the better, and there is one 
particular in which, so far as I have looked into them, they 
all sin alike. I refer to the use of the tenses. Kevisers have 
attempted to establish a parity between the tenses of the 
Greek and English verbs which can hardly be made out, 
and so far is this carried in some of them, as for example, in 
the Gospel of John, as revised by five English clergymen, 
by far the most judicious modern recension known to me, 
that an American cannot help suspecting that the tenses are 
coming to have in England a force which they have not now 
in this country, and never heretofore have had in English 
literature. 

In a lecture on the principles of translation, I laid down 
the rule, that a translator ought to adopt a dialect belonging 
to that period in the history of his own language, when its 
vocabulary and its grammar were in the condition most 
nearly corresponding to those of his original. Now, when 
the version of Wyclifie appeared, English was in a state of 



634 BIBLE DIALECT. 

growth and formation, and the game observation applies, 
though with less force, to the period of Tyndale. The Greek 
of the New Testament, on the other hand, was in a state of 
resolution. It had become less artificial in structure than 
the classical dialect, more approximated to modern syntacti- 
cal construction, and the two languages, by development on 
the one hand, decay on the other, had been brought in the 
sixteenth century to a certain similarity of condition. Be- 
sides, the New Testament Greek was under the same neces- 
sity as early English, of borrowing or inventing a considera- 
ble number of new terms and phrases to express the new 
ideas which Christianity had ingrafted on the Jewish theol- 
ogy ; of creating, in fact, a special sacred phraseology ; and 
hence there is very naturally a closer resemblance between 
the religious dialect of English, as framed by the Reformers, 
and that of the New Testament, than between the common 
literary style of England and the Greek of the classic ages. 
It will generally be found that the passages of the received 
version, whose diction is most purely Saxon, are not only 
most forcible in expression, but also the most faithful tran- 
scripts of the text, and that a Latinized style is seldom em- 
ployed without loss of beauty of language, and at the same 
time of exactness in correspondence.* Whatever questions 
may be raised respecting the accuracy with which particular 
passages are rendered, there seems to be no difference of 
opinion among scholars really learned in the English tongue, 

* The difference between a Latinized and an idiomatic English style is very 
instructively exemplified in the versions of Hereford and Purvey, and, in a less 
degree, in Wycliife's New Testament as compared with the later text. There is 
a somewhat similar distinction between the Rhemish translation and the Protes- 
tant versions of the 16th century, the advantage in almost every instance being 
with the more idiomatic style, in point of both clearness of expression and 
accuracy of rendering. 



EARLY ENGLISH SPECIALLY APPRCPEIATE. 635 

as to the exceeding appropriateness of the style of the author- 
ized version ; and the attempt to bring down that style to the 
standard of to-day is as great an absurdity, and implies as 
mistaken views of the true character and office of human lan- 
guage, and especially of our maternal speech, as would be 
displayed by translating the comedies of Shakespeare into 
the dialect of the popular farces of the season. 

There is another consideration, the force of which can 
hardly be fully apparent except to persons familiar with phi 
lological pursuits, and especially with the scriptural Ian 
guages, and with early English. The subjects of the Testa- 
ments, Old and New, are taken from very primitive and 
inartificial life. "With the exception of the writings of Paul, 
and in a less degree of Luke, there is little evidence of literary 
culture, or of a wide and varied range of thought in their 
authors. They narrate plain facts, and they promulgate doc- 
trines, profound indeed, but addressed less to the speculative 
and discursive, than to the moral and spiritual faculties, and 
hence, whatever may have been the capabilities of Hebrew, 
and of classical Greek for other purposes, the vocabulary of 
the whole Bible is narrow in extent, and extremely simple in 
character. Now, in the early part of the sixteenth century, 
when the development of our religious dialect was completed, 
the English mind, and the English language, were generally 
in a state of culture much more analogous to that of the peo- 
ple and the tongues of Palestine, than they have been at any 
subsequent period. Two centuries later, the native speech 
had been greatly subtilized, if not refined. Good vernacular 
words had been supplanted by foreign intruders, comprehen- 
sive ideas and their vocabulary had been split up into artifi- 
cially discriminated thoughts, and a corresponding multitude 



1)36 NO PRESENT CAUSE FOR REVISION. 

and variety of terms. The language in fact had become too 
copious, and too specific, to have any true correspondences 
with so simple and inartificial a diction as that of the Chris- 
tian Scriptures. Had the Bible then, for the first time, ap- 
peared in an English dress, the translators would have been 
perplexed and confounded with the multitude of terms, each 
expressing a fragment, few the whole, of the meaning of the 
original words for which they must stand ; and, whereas, three 
hundred years ago, but one good translation was possible, 
the eighteenth century might have produced a dozen, none 
altogether good, but none much worse than another. We 
may learn from a paragraph in. Trench what a different 
vocabulary the Bible would have displayed, if it had been 
first executed or thoroughly revised at that period. One 
commentator, he says, thought the phrase " clean escaped " 
a very low expression ; another would reject " straightway, 
haply, twain, athirst, wax, (in the sense of grow,) lack, ensam- 
ple, jeopardy, garner, passion," as obsolete ; while the author 
of a new translation condemns as clownish, barbarous, base, 
hard, technical, misapplied or new-coined, such words as 
beguile, boisterous, lineage, perseverance, potentate, remit, 
shorn, swerved, vigilant, unloose, unction, vocation, and hun- 
dreds of others now altogether approved and familiar. 

From what I have said, it will of course be understood, 
that I see no sufficient present reasons for a new translation, 
or even for a revision of the authorized version of the Bible ; 
but there are certain considerations, distinct from the ques- 
tion of the merits of that version, which ought to be sug- 
gested. The moral and intellectual nature of man has few 
more difficult practical problems to resolve than that of trac- 
ing and following the golden mean between a passion for 



DISTUKBANCE OF FORMTJIAS. 637 

novelty and an ultra-conservative attachment to the time- 
honored and the old. Both extremes are inherently, perhaps 
equally mischievous, but the love of innovation is the more 
dangerous, because the future is more uncertain than the 
past, and because the irreverent and thoughtless wantonness 
of an hour, may destroy that which only the slow and pain- 
ful labor of years or of centuries can rebuild. The elements 
which enter into the formation of public opinion on great 
questions of church and state are so very numerous, and 
their mutual relations and influences are so obscure, that it 
is difficult to control and impossible to predict the course of 
that opinion. In free states, ecclesiastical and political insti- 
tutions are of themselves in so mutable a condition, that any 
voluntary infusion of disturbing ingredients is generally quite 
superfluous, and under most circumstances not a little haz- 
ardous. Intimately connected with the changes of opinion 
on these great subjects are the changes constantly going on 
in language, and which so many circumstances in modern 
society are accelerating with such startling rapidity. Fluc- 
tuations in language are not merely a consequence, they are 
yet more truly an indication, and a cause of corresponding 
fluctuations in moral and intellectual action. "Whoever, 
therefore, uses an important word in a new sense, is contrib- 
uting to change the popular acceptation, and finally the set- 
tled meaning, of all formulas in which that word is an ele- 
ment. Whoever substitutes for an old word of well under- 
stood signification a new vocable or phrase, unsettles, with 
the formulas into which it enters, the opinions of those who 
have habitually clothed their convictions in those stei cotyped 
forms, and thus introduces, first, doubt, and then, departure 
from long received and acknowledged truth. Experience 
has taught jurists that in the revision or amendment of stat- 



638 DISTURBANCE OF FORMULAS. 

utes, and in sanctioning and adopting by legisla five enactment 
current principles of unwritten law, it is a matter of the first 
importance to employ a phraseology whose precise import 
has been fixed by a long course of judicial decisions, and it 
has been found impossible in practice to change the language 
of the law, for the purpose of either modernizing or making 
it otherwise more definite, familiar or intelligible, without at 
the same time changing the law itself. Words and ideas are 
so inseparably connected, they become in a sense so connat- 
ural, that we cannot change the one without modifying the 
other. Every man who knows his own language finds the 
modernization of an old author, substantially a new book. 
It is not, as is often pretended, a putting of old thoughts into 
a new dress. It is the substitution of a new thought more or 
less divergent from the original type. Language is not the 
dress of thought ; it is its living expression, and it controls 
both the physiognomy and the organization of the idea it 
utters. 

A new translation cf the Bible, therefore, or an essential 
modification of the existing version, is substantially a new 
book, a new Bible, another revelation ; and the authors of 
such an enterprise are assuming no less a responsibility than 
that of disturbing, not the formulas only, but the faith of 
centuries. Nothing but a solemn conviction of the absolute 
necessity of such a measure can justify a step involving con- 
sequences so serious, and there are but two grounds on which 
the attempt to change what millions regard as the very 
Words of Life, can be defended These grounds, of course, 
are, first, the incorrectness of the received version, and sec- 
ondly, such a change in the language of ordinary life, as re- 
moves it so far from the dialect of that version, that it is no 
longer intelligible without an amount of special philological 



INEXPEDIENCY OF REVISION. 639 

study out of the reach of the masses who participate in the 
universal instruction of the age. 

Upon this latter point, I can only recapitulate what I 
have already said, in expressing my decided opinion that the 
diction of the English Bible in general cannot be brought 
nearer the dialect of the present day, without departing from 
the style of the original, in the same proportion as it is made 
to approximate to more modern forms, and a more diversi- 
fied vocabulary. At the same time, it is not to be denied, 
that modern criticism has established some better readings 
of the original text, detected some unimportant misinterpre- 
tations of undisputed readings, and pointed out some devia- 
tions from idiomatic propriety of expression in the English 
of our version. None will dispute that the removal of all 
such blemishes would be highly desirable, but there is little 
reason to suppose that such an improvement is practicable at 
the present moment, or that the attempt could now be made, 
without the hazard of incurring greater evils than those 
which, by any large body of competent judges, are now be- 
lieved to exist. That there is any special present necessity 
for a revision cannot be seriously pretended, and a strong, 
perhaps I should say, a decisive objection against a present 
attempt to revise, is the state of existing knowledge with 
respect both to the ancient and the modern languages con- 
cerned in the translation. There is no sufficient reason to 
doubt, that at the end of this century the knowledge of bib- 
lical Greek and Hebrew will be as much in advance of the 
present standard, as that standard is before the sa red phi- 
lology of the beginning of the century ; and there are, on the 
other hand, the strongest grounds for believing that English 
in its history, its true significance, its power, will then be bet- 
ter understood, and more ably wielded than at this day it is, 



64:0 INCKEASING KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLISH. 

or can be. The critical study of English has but just com 
menced. "We are at the beginning of a new era in its his- 
tory. Great as are its powers, men are beginning to feel 
that its necessities are still greater. There is among its au 
thors, an evident stretching out for additional facilities of 
expression, and as a means to this end, a deeper reaching 
down into the wells of its latent capabilities, and hence, as 1 
have so often remarked, a more general and zealous study of 
those ancient forms of English, out of which was built up the 
consecrated dialect of our mother- tongue. A revision of tho 
English Bible, then, is at the present time not merely unne- 
cessary, but, with reference to our knowledge of language, 
wholly premature, and whatever is now done in this way 
will assuredly be thrown aside as worthless, whenever changes 
in the English speech, or the discovery of important errors in 
the received translation, shall make the want of a better a 
real want. 

The present is an unfavorable moment in some other re- 
spects. The acuteness of German criticism, the speculations 
of German philosophy and theology, have given rise to a 
great multitude and diversity of opinions, not on questions 
of verbal interpretation merely, but of doctrine also, which 
are but just now beginning to be openly and freely discussed 
in this country and in England, and the minds of men are 
now perhaps more unsettled on these topics than they have 
been at any time for three centuries. It is highly improba- 
ble, that, leaving the question of competency aside, a suffi- 
cient number of biblical scholars could be found even within 
the limits of any one Protestant denomination in either coun- 
try, whose theological views so far harmonize, that they 
would agree in new forms of expression upon points now 
under discussion; and, of course, between them and scholars 



EVILS OF MANY REVISIONS. 641 

of other denominations, the discrepancy would je still wider, 
so that every sect, however few in numbers, which feels the 
want of a revision, would be under the necessity of framing 
one for itself. There seems, however, to be some reason for 
believing, that when the excitement growing out of the nov- 
elty of the discussions which are going on, in lay as well as 
clerical circles, shall have subsided, there will be a more gen- 
eral concurrence of opinion, both in denominations and be- 
tween them ; and then there is room to hope that increased 
harmony and increased knowledge may conspire to give the 
English Bible a greater perfection in point of accuracy and 
of expression, and at the same time a catholic adaptation to 
both the future speech and the future opinion of English and 
American Protestant Christianity. 

The objections against a multitude of sectarian transla- 
tions are very serious. The dialect of the English Bible is 
also the dialect of devotion and of religious instruction wher- 
ever the English language is spoken, and all denominations 
substantially agree in their sacred phraseology, with what- 
ever difference of interpretation. There are always possibil- 
ities of reconciliation, sympathies even, between men who, in 
matters of high concernment, habitually use the same words, 
and appeal to the same formulas ; whereas a difference of 
language and of symbols creates an almost impassable gulf 
between man and man. "When, therefore, we have, not dif- 
ferent churches only, but different Bibles, different religious 
dialects, different devotional expressions, the jealousies of 
sectarian division will be more hopelessly embittered, and 
the prospect of bringing about a greater harmony of opinion 
and of feeling among English-speaking Protestants propor- 
tionally darkened. 

At this day, there could be no harmony of action on this 
41 



042 SECTARIANISM. 

subject between different churches. Even Trench, a man of 
a liberal spirit, seems to reject the plan of uniting for this 
purpose with those not embraced in the organization of his 
own church, though he admits, that, with the exception of 
the " so-called Baptists," they might advantageously be in- 
vited to offer suggestions — to be decided upon, apparently, 
by a body of which they are not to be members. Those who 
proclaim views of such narrow exclusiveness have no right to 
expect, that theologians who dissent from them on questions 
of ecclesiastical government will be more charitable than 
themselves, and it is not probable that scholars, who are not 
of the English church, will be very prompt to offer sugges- 
tions upon such terms. So long as this sectarian feeling — 
for it can be appropriately designated by no other term — 
prevails on either side, there can be no union upon conditions 
compatible with the self-respect of the parties; and unless 
better counsels prevail, whenever revision comes, English 
and American Protestantism will have not one Bible, one 
standard of religious faith, but many. 

Besides the inconveniences of such a state of things, to 
which I have just alluded, there is the further evil, that each 
one of the new revisions will be greatly inferior to what the 
joint labors of scholars of different denominations might pro- 
duce. Whatever crude and hasty opinions * individuals may 
adopt with respect to the superior learning and ability of 
their own religious communions, it is very certain that neither 
the English church, nor any other Christian sect, possesses, 
within its own limits, so full a measure of knowledge and 
talent, that in such a work as the revision of the English 

* An old and just definition of opinio, is assensus rei non exploratae, 
and there is a vast deal of sectarian religious opinion in all Christian denomina- 
tions, which cannot lay claim to any higher logical value. 



REVISION NOW INEXPEDIENT. 643 

Bible, it can afford to dispense with the co-operation of othei 
denominations ; and the ecclesiastical body which cnts itself 
off from other branches of the church, by attempting that 
work without at least an earnest effort to secure such co- 
operation upon equal and honorable terms, may justly be 
deemed schismatic. 

In a brief discourse like the present, the arguments on 
this question can be hinted only, not detailed ; but I think 
we may justify the general conclusion, that as there is no 
present necessity for a revision, so is there no possibility of 
executing a revision in a way that would be, or ought to be, 
satisfactory even to any one Protestant sect, still less to the 
whole body of English-speaking Protestants. To revise 
under present circumstances, is to sectarianize, to divide the 
one catholic English Bible, the common standard of author- 
ity in Protestant England and America, into a dozen differ- 
ent revelations, each authoritative for its own narrow circle, 
but, to all out of that circle, a counterfeit ; it is a practical 
surrender of that human excellence of form in the English 
Bible, which, next to the unspeakable value of its substance, 
is the greatest gift which God has bestowed on the British 
and American people. 



LECTURE XXIX. 

CORRUPTIONS OF LANGUAGE. 

In studying the history of the successive changes in lan- 
guage, it is by no means easy to discriminate, at all times, 
between positive corruptions, which tend to the deterioration 
of a tongue in expressiveness or moral elevation of vocabulary, 
in distinctness of articulation, in logical precision, or in clear- 
ness of structure, and changes which belong to the character 
of speech, as a living semi-organism connatural with man or 
constitutive of him, and so participating in his mutations. 
By these latter changes, language continually adapts itself 
to the intellectual and material condition of those who use it, 
grows with their growth, shares in their revolutions, perishes 
in their decay. Its changes of this sort can be resisted by 
no limited special effort, and they can be checked only by 
the same conservative influences that retard the decline of 
the race to which it is vernacular. Mere corruptions, on the 
contrary, which arise from extraneous or accidental causes, 
may be detected, exposed, and if not healed, at least pre- 
vented from spreading beyond their source, and infecting a 
whole nation. To pillory such offences, to point out their 



VULGARISMS IN LANGUAGE. 645 

absurdity, to detect and expose the moral obliquity which 
too often lurks beneath them, is the sacred duty of every 
scholar, of every philosophic thinker, who knows how nearly 
purity of speech, like personal cleanliness, is allied with 
purity of thought and rectitude of action. When, then, the 
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table ridicules the affectation of 
responding to a remark of your companion by an interroga- 
tive, Yes? when a journalist laughs at the Cockney use of 
immediately and directly in place of as soon as, or after / as 
for example, directly John came, I went away ; or the 
Americanism of employing community without the article, 
as in community, for in the community ; the vulgarism of 
such phrases as, in our midst, and, unbeknown to me ; the 
preciosity, if I may use an expressive Gallicism, of not merely 
pronouncing, but of exaggerating the t in often, as if it were 
ofttun or oftten ; the provincial substitution of the obscure 
for the clear pronunciation of the final vowel, transforming 
Mississippi and Ohio into Mississippuh and Ohiuh ; in all 
these cases, a real service is rendered to the community, and 
to the language. 

Latham appears to me to confound the progress of natu- 
ral linguistic change, which is inevitable, and the deteriora- 
tion arising from accidental or local causes, which may be 
resisted, and he denies that there can be any such thing as 
the corruption of a language. All languages, he thinks, are 
equally intelligible, and consequently, equally what they 
ought to be, namely, mediums of intercourse between man 
and man, and hence, continues he, " in language whatever is 
is rightP In the concluding paragraph of the Preface to the 
second edition of his Treatise on the English Language, he 
observes : " I am not desirous of sacrificing truth to an an- 



64:6 LATHAM ON LANGUAGE. 

ti thesis ; but so certain is language to change from logics* 
accuracy to logical license, and at the same time, so certain 
is language, when so changed, to be as intelligible as before, 
that I venture upon asserting that not only whatever is is right, 
but also that in many cases whatever was ivas wrong" There 
is in this passage a singular confusion of thought and of ex- 
pression. First, it maintains the paradox, that when lan- 
guages were spoken with logical accuracy, they were wrong, 
but now, when they have degenerated into logical license, 
they are right ; and, secondly, the final conclusion contra- 
dicts the premises from which it is deduced. The argument 
is, that language always adapts itself to the uses of those 
who employ it, that it changes only as they change, and that 
it is at all times equally well suited to the great purposes for 
which that faculty was given to man. If this is so, then that 
which was must have been right for the time when it was, 
upon the same principle that that which is is right for the 
present time. To affirm, then, as a result from the general 
doctrine of the constant adaptation of language to man's 
nature and wants, that all that at any time is in language is 
right, but that something which at a past time was was 
wrong, is not an " antithesis," but a palpable inconsistency, 
a contradiction in terms. Either, then, our author means 
that whatever is is right, and, upon the same principle, what- 
ever was was right, but, by virtue of necessary changes in 
speech, much that was right is at present wrong, or he means 
nothing at all ; and his entire proposition is at war with 
itself, and, as lawyers say, repugnant. But in spite of the 
authority of Latham, I see no reason why, independently of 
the evidence of comparison between different stages of a 
given tongue, we may not as well speak of the corruption of 



CORRUPTION OF LANGUAGE. 647 

a language, as of the deterioration of a race. No 11 an doubta 
that certain species or families of animals, man himself in 
eluded, become, by change of climate, or of other natural 
conditions, physically inferior to what they have been in 
former and different circumstances, and there is unhappily 
equally irresistible evidence of the moral and intellectual 
deterioration of nations. When, then, a people, once great 
in mind, great in virtue, powerful in material energy, be- 
comes enfeebled in intellect, depraved in heart, and effemi- 
nate in action, and their language drops the words belonging 
especially to the higher faculties and perceptions, or perverts 
them to sensuous, base, earthly uses, and is no longer capa- 
ble of the expression of lofty conceptions, generous emotions, 
or virtuous resolves, are we not to say that their language is 
corrupted ? So far as respects the needs and conveniences 
of material life, it may perhaps be true that one form of it is 
as exj>ressive and appropriate as another, but the theory 
which I am combating, forgets that language is not a tool, or 
even a machine, but is of itself an informing vital agency, 
and that, so truly as language is what man has made it, just 
bo truly man is what language has made him. The deprava- 
tion of a language is not merely a token or an effect of the 
corruption of a people, but corruption is accelerated, if not 
caused by the perversion and degradation of its consecrated 
vocabulary ; for every human speech has its hallowed dialect, 
its nomenclature appropriated to the service of sacred things, 
the conscience, the generous affections, the elevated aspira- 
tions, without which humanity is not a community of speak- 
ing men, but a herd of roaring brutes. When, therefore, pop- 
ular writers in vulgar irony apply to vicious and depraved 
objects, names or epithets set apart by the common consent 



648 LOCAL CORRUPTIONS. 

of society to designate the qualities or the acts which consti- 
tute man's only claim to reverence and affection, they both 
corrupt the speech, and administer to the nation a poison 
more subtile and more dangerous, because less obvious, than 
the bitterest venom with which the destructive philosophy- 
has ever assailed the moral or the spiritual interests of hu- 
manity. 

Besides the moral degradation of language, accidental 
circumstances, such as the affectations and caprices of fash- 
ionable society, the inaccuracies or the whim of a distin- 
guished and influential individual, and especially the ambi- 
tious ignorance of would-be reformers, often corrupt lan- 
guage philologically, by introducing violations of grammar, 
or of other proprieties of speech, which a servile spirit of imi- 
tation adopts, and which, at last, supersede proper and idio- 
matic forms of expression. Again, the usage of a great city 
or an important province, itself occasioned purely by local 
and temporary circumstances, may extend over a whole 
country, and thus words, phrases, syntactical combinations, 
not only ill-suited, but repugnant to the genius of a lan- 
guage, may force their way into it, to the exclusion of more 
appropriate terms, and become permanent, though inharmo- 
nious and ill-assimilated ingredients of the national speech. 
Changes of this sort are not exemplifications of the general 
laws of language, any more than the liability to be smitten 
with pestilence through infection is an exemplification of the 
normal principles of physiology ; and therefore a language 
thus affected is as properly said to be corrupted, as a person 
who has taken a contagious malady to be diseased. 

So with respect to pronunciation. Are not the emascu- 
lation of our once manly and sonorous tongue, by contract 



IGNORANCE OF REFORMERS. 649 

ing long vowels into short and suppressing short vowels 
altogether, the crowding of half a dozen syllables into one 
explosive utterance, the thick indistinguishable articulation, 
the crazy confusion of the aspirate and silent h, all of which 
characterize the native dialect of London, and but for the 
influence of printing on pronunciation, which I have dis- 
cussed on a former occasion, would have spread over the 
whole island — are not these corruptions of speech which 
should be exposed, stigmatized, and corrected, as well as 
moral delinquencies, or vulgarisms of manner? To deny 
that language is susceptible of corruption, is to deny that 
races or nations are susceptible of depravation ; and to treat 
all its changes as normal, is to confound things as distinct as 
health and disease. 

I have spoken of the ignorance of grammarians as a fre- 
quent cause of the corruption of language. An instance of 
this is the clumsy and unidiomatic continuing present of the 
passive voice, which, originating not in the sound common 
sense of the people, but in the brain of some grammatical 
pretender, has widely spread, and threatens to establish 
itself as another solecism in addition to the many which our 
syntax already presents. The phrase ' the house is being 
built J for ' the.house is building J is an awkward neologism, 
which neither convenience, intelligibility, nor syntactical con- 
gruity demands, and the use of which ought therefore to be 
discountenanced, as an attempt at the artiiicial improvement 
of the language in a point which needed no amendment. 
The English active present, or rather aorist, participle in -ing 
is not an Anglo-Saxon, but a modern form, and did not 
make its appearance as a participle, until after the general 
characteristics which distinguish English from Saxon were 



650 PASSIVE WITH "BEING." 

fixed. The Saxon active participle terminated iLende, as 
lufigende, loving; but there was a verbal noun with the 
ending -ung, sometimes written -ing, as clsensung or 
clasnsing, cleaning or cleansing. The final vowel of the 
participle was soon dropped, and the termination -and or 
-end became the sign of that part of speech. The nominal 
form in -ung also disappeared, and -ing became the uniform 
ending of verbal nouns. Between the verbal noun of action 
and the active participle, there is a close grammatical as 
well as logical analogy, which is exemplified in such phrases 
in French and English as l'appe tit vient en mangeant, 
appetite comes with eating. Hence the participle ending in 
-and or -end and the verbal noun ending in -ing were con- 
founded, and at last the old participial sign, though long 
continued in Scotland, was dropped altogether in England, 
and the sign of the verbal noun employed for both purposes. 
I have observed on former occasions, that when new forms 
are superseding old ones, as for example, in the substitution 
of its for his as a neuter possessive, since for sith, there is 
often a period when good writers avoid the employment of 
either. This was the case with regard to the new and old 
forms of the active participle, for in the Ormulum, which 
contains more than twenty thousand lines, there is not a sin- 
gle instance of the use of the active participle in either form, 
though there are four or iive participial adjectives in -end, 
and twenty or twenty-five verbal nouns in -ing. The ancient 
termination in -end survived in popular speech long after it 
became extinct in literature, and the vulgar pronunciation, 
goin\ livin\ and the like, is a relic of that form, not a drop- 
ping of the nasal g final in the modern inflection. 

The earliest form in which the phrase we are considering 



PASSIVE WITH "BEING." 651 

occurs is, i the house is in building, or a building,' a being 
probably a contraction of the Saxon on, or the modern Eng- 
lish in* Ben Jonson, in his English grammar, states ex- 
pressly that before the participle present, a, and if before a 
vowel, an, give the participle the force of a gerund ; and he 

* The following examples show that the form " in building," or, " a build- 
ing," was in constant use from the very dawn of English literature to the 
seventeenth century. In III. (I.) Kings vi. 7, we have, in the older Wycliffite 
version, was beeldid ; in the later, was in bildyng ; in a manuscript of the 14th 
century, quoted by Hearne, Langtoft's Chronicle I. cxcvii., whille the churche 
was in byldynge ; in the old romance of Robert the Devyle, Thorn's edition, p. 
8, as this chylde was a berynge to the chirche, p. 32, whyle your penaunce be 
a doynge ; in the prose Morte D'Arthur, Lib. II. c. viii., the mene whyle as this 
was a doyng ; in Skelton's Tales, Dyce's edition I. lxiv., there shall you see my 
tombe a makynge ; in Lord Berners' Froissart 1. 143, had beene longe a makynge, 
p. 255, was longe a dryvinge ; in Palsgrave's French Grammar, pp. 380, 382, 
383, 384, in doing, and other similar constructions ; in Tyndale's and Coverdale's 
translations, John ii. 20, this temple was abuyldynge ; in Cranmer's and the 
Geneva versions of the same passage, was a byldynge; in I. Peter hi. 20, in 
Tyndale's, Coverdale's, Cranmer's, and King James's translations, while the ark 
was a preparing ; in the Rhemish version of the same verse, was a building; but 
in the Geneva, the modern form, the ark was preparing ; in Holingshed hi. 126, 
whilst these things were a dooing ; in I. Kings vi. 7, authorized version, while 
it was in building ; in Shakespeare, Macbeth iii. 4, while tis a making, Hamlet 
i. 3, as it is a making ; in John Smith's Virginia, 230, their shallop, which was 
a mending ; in Howell's Dodona's Grove, 107, a doing, and in Hawley's Preface to 
Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum, in doing, in both these last instances, as well as in 
all the others, in a passive sense. 

Thus, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the verbal noun, with 
the preposition in or a, appears to have been constantly employed. The phrase, 
the ark was preparing, given from the Geneva New Testament, in Bagster's 
Hexapla, is probably a misprint for a preparing, as no other example of that 
.onn is known to occur until long after the date of that version. The only early 
instances of a construction bearing any analogy to the neologism, is being built, 
which I have been able to find, are in Fabyan's Chronicle, Ellis's reprint of 
Pynson's edition of 1516. These are, page 1, " The Cytie of Rome was begone 
to be buylded'm the XL yere of Esechias;" and p. 576, "In this yere also was 
ye Guylde halle of Lodon begon to be newe edyfied;" but these have little direct 
bearing on the question. After the construction in, or, a building, making, 
&c, went out of use, the verbal noun was regularly employed with a passive 
signification, as in this expression in the XXIII. Letter of Junius , " the lines 
are dravnng around him," until a very recent period. See App. 79. 



652 PASSIVE WITH 

cites as an example, " a great tempest was a brewi?ig" The 
obvious explanation of this form of speech is, that what gram- 
marians choose to call a present participle, is really a verbal 
noun ; and, if so, there is nothing more irregular or anomalous 
in the phrase l the ship is in building,' than in saying ' be 
industrious in working, be moderate in drinking ; ' for the 
verbal noun may as well have a passive, as an active or a 
neuter signification. 

The preposition on or a w as dropped about the beginning 
of the eighteenth century, but it is still understood ; and in 
this construction, though the form is the same as that of the 
participle, the verbal noun is still as much a noun as it was 
when the preposition was expressed. 

But if this explanation be rejected, and it be insisted that, 
in the phrase in question, building, making, dec, are true par- 
ticiples, active in form, but passive in signification, the con- 
struction may be defended, both by long usage, which is the 
highest of all linguistic authorities, and by the analogy of 
numerous established forms of speech, the propriety of which 
no man thinks of questioning. The active form is passive in 
sense in the phrases, he is to blame, I give you this picture to 
examine, he has books to sell, this fruit is good to eat. It is 
true that in these expressions, and others of similar construc- 
tion, what appears to be an infinitive active is not so, but a 
relic of the Anglo-Saxon corresponding phrase, consisting of 
a gerund preceded by the particle to, which in that language 
was not the sign of the infinitive, as it is in modern English ; 
but, nevertheless, the analogical argument from an author- 
ized use of an active form in a passive sense remains unaf- 
fected. The common expression, these books sell well, and 
many others similar in principle, admit of no such explana- 



PASSIVE WITH "being.'' 653 

tion ; and the verb, though active in inflection, is as unequivo- 
cally passive in signification, as are the Latin vapulo and 
veneo. Upon what principle, but the passive use of an 
active participial form, can we explain such phrases as drink- 
ing-water, a riding-horse, for water fit to be drunk, or a 
horse kept to be ridden ? It is no answer to say that these 
are to be considered as compound words, because the passive 
sense still remains witli the active ending. So, in this ex- 
pression, i considering the shortness and uncertainty of life, 
it is presumptuous in any man to expect to attain to the age 
of a hundred years,' considering is used in a passive sense, as 
is seen clearly by the French equivalent in this construction, 
which is the passive participle vu or attendu.* 

The expressions, the falling-sickness, a stepping-stone, a 
spinning-wheel, a stumbling-block, a drinking-glass, a work- 
ing-day, the latter two of which at least are true compounds, 
are not exactly analogous with any I have cited ; for though 
drinking-water is water that is or may be drunk, and a rid- 
ing-horse is a horse that is or may be ridden, yet we cannot 
so convert these last phrases. A drinking-glass is not a glass 
to be drunk ; but neither is it the glass that drinks, the day 
that works, or the wheel that spins. But, though not gram- 
matically identical, these constructions are of the same anom- 
alous character as ' the house is building' — the resolution of 
which into 'the house is a building, or in building,' is as 
easy and as idiomatic as to translate ' drinking-glass ' into ' a 
glass for drinking.' 

* When the sentence contains a personal nominative with which the participle 
may agree, it may possibly be regarded as active ; as, lor example, ' considering 
the feeble state of his health, he ought not to undertake the journey;' which 
may be resolved into, ' he, considering the feeble state of his health, ought not 
&c.' 



654 PASSIVE WITH "building." 

But, independently of these analogies, we have several 
combinations, in which even the purists, who condemn the 
phrase in question, employ precisely the same form, and that, 
too, not with a verbal noun, but with a true participle. To 
owe, to miss, to want, are all transitive verbs ; but no Eng 
lishman scruples to speak of debts owing, to say that a paper 
is missing, or that a sovereign is wanting* to make up & 
specified sum. 

The reformers who object to the phrase I am defending, 
must, in consistency, employ the proposed substitute with all 
passive participles, and in other tenses, as well as the present. 
They must say therefore : The subscription-paper is being 
missed, but I know that a considerable sum is being wanted 
to make up the amount ; the great Victoria bridge has been 
being built more than two years ; when I reach London, the 
ship Leviathan will be being built ; if my orders had been 
followed, the coat would have been being made yesterday ; if 
the house had then been being built, the mortar would have 
been being mixed. 

Besides these cases of active verbal forms with a passive 
sense, we have nouns of similar character. Confessor, for 
example, analogically ought to mean one who confesses ; 
whereas it signifies a priest who is confessed to: prisoner 
should be a man who imprisons, but it signifies one who is 
imprisoned. There are even examples of passive participles 

* These expressions are all old. The first occurs in a letter from Henry VII. 
to his mother, written certainly as early as 1508: "Ye * * have graunted 
unto me * * such debts and duties which is oweing and dew to you, &c." 
Fisher's Sermon on Countess of Derby, Appendix, p. 38. 

Wanting is several times used by Palsgrave in a similar way ; as, " though any 
fewe wordes * * shall fortune * * * to be wantyng ; " and, " which he 
* * shall suppose to be wantyng." Palsgrave, 868. 



ANALOGOUS FORMS. 



655 



with an active sense. A well-spoken, or a fair-spoken man, is 
a man who speaks well or smoothly ; and well-seen in a sci- 
ence not long since meant seeing far into, having a deep in- 
sight into, that science. All languages are full of these 
anomalies ; and he who resolves to utter or write nothin 
which he cannot parse, will find himself restricted to a beg 
garly diction. 

The employment of active forms with a passive sense, and 
contrariwise, the attribution of an active force to passive 
inflections, are sanctioned by the analogy of all the languages 
to which English is related. Not to mention exceptional 
cases, the Latins regularly employed the gerundial both 
actively and passively ; the Latin deponent and the Greek 
middle voice, passive in form, are active in sense ; the Ice- 
landic active participle is used gerundially as a passive ; as 
ecki er truanda, it is not to be believed ; in some, at 
least, of the Frisic dialects, the same construction is used, 
tha drivanda and tha draganda, the driving, and the 
carrying, meaning live cattle which can he driven, and life- 
less articles which can be carried ; the Danes say, blsesende 
Instrumenter, blowing instruments, for instruments that 
are blown, wind instruments ; and, in spite of the gramma 
rians, few Germans would hesitate to say, with Liebig, eine 
zu begriindende Wissenschaft, a science founded, or 
to be founded, &c.;* or to speak of das zu beziehende 
Ilaus, the house to be occupied, eine vorhabende Reise, 
a journey to be undertaken, while verdienter and B e d i e n- 



* Es giebt in der That Aerzte und medicinische Schriftsteller welche behaup- 
ten dass eine auf exacte Kenntniss zu begriindende Wissenschaft dei 
diatetischen und medicinischen Praxis unmSglich sei. Liebig Chem. Briefe 
4te. Auflage, I. 17. 



656 NEW PARTICIPIAL CONSTRUCTIONS. 

ter, participial passive forms are constantly used actively 
the one as an adjective, the other as a nonn. 

Upon the whole, then, we may say, that the construction 
1 the house is building ' is sustained by the authority of usage, 
and by many analogies in the English and cognate languages. 
Nor is it objectionable as an equivocal phrase, because it is 
very seldom used when the subj ect is of such a nature that it 
can be an agent, and always with a context, or under cir- 
cumstances which show that the participle must be taken in 
a passive sense. 

To reject it, therefore, is to violate the laws of language 
by an arbitrary change ; and, in this particular case, the pro- 
posed substitute is at war with the genius of the English 
tongue. 

But if an innovation in the established phraseology of the 
last two centuries must be made, either for the sake of change, 
or with the view of harmonizing English syntax to the eye, 
let us at once cast ofY the fear of ignorant criticism and the 
sneers of precisian affectation, go back to the primitive con- 
struction, which the popular good sense and grammatical 
instincts of humble English life have still preserved, and say, 
with our fathers — ' the ark was a preparing,' ' the house was 
in building.' 

The participial form is, in most languages, a stumbling- 
block,* and the resemblance between that part of speech and 
the verbal adjective is a constant source of embarrassment. 
How subtle and difficult of application are the rules for de- 
termining when the active participle in French is to be 
treated as a form of the verb, and so not declined, and when 



* Query for the purists : Ought I rather to say, A block-that-is-bemg 
gturabled-at ? 



NEW PARTICIPIAL CONSTRUCTIONS. 657 

as ail adjective, and accordingly to be varied for gender and 
number. And in French and Italian, bow bard to know 
wben the participle in the compound tenses is declinable, and 
when not ! We have not the same, but analogous, difficul- 
ties in our own words of the same class. There is a large 
number of both active or present, and past or passive parti- 
ciples, which use has converted into adjectives, and their 
syntax has been modified accordingly. To the employment 
of those to which the ear has been familiarized by practice, 
we are reconciled, but we instinctively shrink from every 
new attempt to confound words of these two classes. There 
is at present an inclination in England to increase the num- 
ber of active, in America, of passive participles, employed 
with the syntax of the adjective. Thus, in England it is 
common to hear : " such a thing is very damaging" and the 
phrase has been recently introduced into this country. Trench 
says : " "Words which had become unintelligible or mislead- 
ing" and " the phrase could not have been other than more 
or less misleading y " " these are the most serious and most 
recurring." Now, though pleasing, gratifying, encouraging, 
and many other like words have long been established as 
adjectives, yet the cases cited from Trench strike us as un- 
pleasant novelties. The rule appears to be this : Where there 
exists an adjective of corresponding meaning, we cannot em- 
ploy the participle as an adjective ; but if there is no such 
adjective, the participle may take its place. To apply this : 
we ought not to say very damaging, because we have the 
adjective injurious j or very recurring, because we have fre- 
quent. But we may employ gratifying and encouraging as 
adjectives, because there are no English adjectives with the 
same meaning. Upon the same principle, we may justify 

the Utse of misleading with an adjectival syntax, though it 
42 



658 SHALL AND WILL. 

has a raw and unpleasant savor, and it is objectknable only 
because it is new. 

Many past or rather passive participles have long been 
employed as adjectives, and it is difficult to lay down a rule 
for distinguishing between them. A practical criterion is 
the application of the adverb very, which we use to qualify 
adjectives, not participles, except when the latter have be 
come adjectives ; thus we say ' I am very happy J but not * I 
am very delighted / ' though very tired, very learned, and the 
like, are freely employed. The inclination in this country is 
to enlarge the list of these words, and we not unfrequently 
hear such expressions as ' very satisfied,' ' very pleased.' It 
is not easy to see why we may say ' a tired man,' ' a learned 
man,' 'he is very tired or very learned;' but, on the other 
hand, while we use the phrase ' a disappointed man,' we can- 
not say ' he is very disappointed,' though he is ' very much 
disappointed ' is an idiomatic phrase. 

The more frequent employment of both the participles 
with an adjectival syntax, is, in its origin, a Gallicism, but 
it also exemplifies the prevailing inclination to reject purely 
grammatical distinctions, and to simplify our grammar, by 
assimilating forms and phrases which suggest no substantial 
difference of sense, while we are at the same time increasing 
our power of expression by enlarging our vocabulary, and 
more nicely discriminating between words of like general 
meaning. 

It is doubtless an impovement in any language to increase 
the significance of its vocabulary, and make the meaning of 
a period depend more on the inherent force, and less on the 
form and arrangement, of the words that compose it ; and 
therefore, though every man of taste will prefer to follow 
rather than to lead in linguistic changes, yet there is no 



SHALL AND WILL. 659 

aound objection to the tendencies of which I am speaking; 
except the repnlsive effect of all neologisms in syntax. 

The same observation will apply to another grammatical 
subtlety, which, whatever may be its origin, has at present 
no logical value or significance whatever. I refer to the dis- 
tinction between will and shall, as used with different per- 
sonal pronouns, whether as signs of the future, or as forms 
of determination or authority. I shall, you will, and he will, 
are generally simply futures, predictions ; and will and shall 
are true auxiliaries. I will, you shall, and he shall, are ex- 
pressions of determination ; and will and shall are not true 
auxiliaries. No very satisfactory explanation of a distinc- 
tion apparently so arbitrary has been given, though some 
ingenious suggestions as to the origin of it have been offered ; 
but, whatever foundation may once have existed for this 
nicety, it now answers no intellectual purpose. In Scotland, 
and in many parts of the United States, will and shall are 
confounded, or at least not employed according to the estab- 
lished English usage. There is little risk in predicting that 
at no very distant day, this verbal quibble will disappear, 
and that one of the auxiliaries will be employed with all per- 
sons of the nominative, exclusively as the sign of the future, 
and the other only as an expression of purpose or authority. 
To persons accustomed to be scrupulous in the use of these 
words, the confusion or irregular employment of them is one 
of the most disagreeable of all departures from the English 
idiom ; but as the subtlety in question serves no end but to 
embarrass, the rejection of it, accompanied with a constant 
distinction in meaning between the two words, must be 
itemed not a corruption, but a rational improvement. 

It is impossible, in a single lecture, to notice in detail 
the thousand violations of grammatical propriety, which are 



660 W RESPECT OF. 

constantly springing up and threatening to pervert and && 
naturalize our mother tongue ; but the deliberate introduc- 
tion of incorrect forms, whether by the coinage of new, 01 
the revival of obsolete and inexpressive syntactical combina- 
tions, ought to be resisted even in trifles, especially where it 
leads to the confusion of distinct ideas. An example of this 
is the recent use of the adverbial phrases in respect of, in 
regard of, for in or with respect or regard to. This innova- 
tion is without any syntactical ground, and ought to be con- 
demned and avoided as a mere grammatical crotchet. 

The writers of the seventeenth century used these expres- 
sions in three senses : First, for ' in comparison with ; ' as, 
the expenses of the government are small, in respect of its 
revenue ; secondly, for ' by reason of' or ' on account of; ' 
as, in respect of our ignorance and frailty, we ought to be 
humble ; and finally, as a mode of introducing a subject, lim- 
iting a general proposition, or referring to a particular point, 
in which case it was equivalent to the phrases ' as to,' ' in 
reference to] ■ respecting' ' so far as concerns,' &c* The first 
use, that expressive of comparison, soon became obsolete, 
and has not been revived. The form, in respect or regard of 

* First sense, of " comparison : " 

The Warres of Latter Ages seeme to be made in the Darke, in respect of the 
glory and honour which reflected upon men from the Wars in ancient Time. 
Bacon's Essays, 1639, Essay xxix. Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms. 

second sense, " by reason," or, " on account of:" 

The Northern tract of the World is in nature the more martial Kegion : be 
it in respect of the Stars of that Hemisphere, * * * or of the cold of the 
Northern parts, which * * * doth make the bodie? hardest and the courago 
warmest. Do., do., Essay lviii. Of Vicissitudes of Things. 

Third sense, " relatively to," or, " with reference to : " 

Timing of the Sute is the principal; Timing, I say, not onely in respcci 
of the Person that should grant it, but in respect of those which are like tc 
crosse it. Do., do., Essay xlix. Of Suitors. 



IN RESPECT DF. 661 

was then confined to the meaning, by reason of, on account 
of ; and in or with respect or regard to was employed in the 
sense of in reference to, respecting. This employment of these 
latter two forms had become well settled, though the first of 
them was seldom employed except in the dialect of the law. 
Coleridge was the first eminent writer of this century who 
returned to the practice of using ' in respect of ' exclusively ; 
but his writings never had sufficient currency to produce 
much influence on the language. Since his time, however, 
some deservedly popular writers have employed this phrase ; 
and with Trencli it is a pet construction, and often introduced 
when a very different phrase would much better express its 
meaning. It rests, of course, on the theory that in this 
phrase, respect or regard is an independent noun, and there- 
fore should be followed by the preposition of. But this, I 
think, is a mistaken view of the subject. The word respect 
in this combination has none of the meanings known to it as 
an independent noun, in the English vocabulary. The ex- 
pression ' in or with respect ' is an idiotism, a phraseological 
construction of an adverbial character, and in its ordinary 
modern use, it is the equivalent of relatively. Old writers 
sometimes say ' respectively to.' This is now disused ; but 
' relatively to ' is by no means unfrequent, and ' in respect 
off used in this sense, is just as gross a violation of English 
grammar as to write ' relatively of or in reference of? 

The mere violation of a grammatical rule would be a 
comparatively small evil ; but most of the writers who have 
adopted this innovation, are so anxious to parade it, as a 
badge of the style of a school, that they drag it in on all 
occasions, where they can, by any chance, contrive to intro- 
duce it, very often employing it in constructions that leave it 



IN KESPECT OF. 

difficult to determine whether they mean relatively to, or by 
reason of, or in point of; and the vague use of -the phrase, of 
course, tends to embarrass the reader by confounding in ex- 
pression things logically very distinct.* 

The two changes which I have now been considering are 
not of popular, but of scholastic origin, and they are wholly 
the fruit of an affectation of superior correctness. But there 
is, among the novelties I have referred to, one which origi- 
nated with the multitude, and has a psychological foundation, 
though it is too much at variance with the general analogy 
of the language to deserve countenance. I refer to the use 
of the word community without the article, when not em- 
ployed in the sense of in common; as, for example, ' Com- 
munity is interested in the question ;' ' the policy is injurious 
to community.'' So far as I am aware, no respectable writer 
has sanctioned this form of speech, and it is justly regarded 
as a very gross vulgarism ; but I could name persons of some 
position hi the literary world, who employ it colloquially. 
The general rule is, that common nouns employed in a defi- 
nite sense in the singular number, must take the article. 
Thus, in the first of the instances just given, though ignorant 
people, and some who are not ignorant, except in this partic- 
ular, say ' Community is interested in the question,' no one 
would say, ''Public is interested in the question.' The philo- 
logical instinct of every English-speaking man would be 
shocked at the omission of the article, and would correct the 

* Nobody ever thinks of saying, "in reference of;" but if these phrases are 
to be governed by the rules of English construction of nouns, there is as good 
ground for this expression as for "in respect of" The Latin etymology of 
respect has nothing to do with the question, for the Latin primitive was not used 
for any such purpose, or in any such construstion ; and the phrase in question 
is strictly an English idiotism. 



OMISSION OF ARTICLE. 663 

pnrase by supplying it, ' The public is interested.' .Now, 
the grammatical category of the words community and pub- 
lie in these examples is the same. Why, then, do some ears 
demand the article . n one case, and reject it in the other ? 
The explanation is this. When we personify common nouns 
used definitely in the singular number, we may omit the 
article. Thus Holy Church, not the Holy Church, was 
constantly used by old writers, because the church was in- 
vested with personality, regarded as a thinking, acting, 
authoritative entity. For the same reason, Parliament, and 
in England, Ministers, used instead of the ministry, do not 
take the article ; nor, according to present usage, does Con- 
gress, as applied to our National Legislature ; and in the 
ecclesiastical proceedings of some religious denominations, 
Convention and Synod are employed in the same way, on the 
same principle. "With respect to Congress, the omission of 
the article is recent, for during the Revolution, while the 
Federal Government was a body of doubtful authority and 
permanence, and not yet familiar to the people as a great 
continuing, constitutive, and ordaining power, the phrase 
used was commonly ' the Congress,' and such is the form of 
expression in the Constitution itself. But when the Govern- 
ment became consolidated, and Congress was recognized as 
the paramount legislative power of the Union, the embodi- 
ment of the national will, it was personified, and the article 
dropped, and in like manner, the word Government is often 
used in the same way. Now in our time, as I have often had 
occasion to remark, society has become more intensely social ; 
the feeling of union, and of mutual interest, the conscious- 
ness of reciprocal right and duty, are strengthened, and the 
body of the nation is more habitually regarded as a homo« 



664: ANCIENT LITERATURE. 

geneous self-conscious agent. Hence, what we call ' the com- 
munity ' is conceived of as a being, not as a thing ; as an 
organic combination, a person in short, not as an assemblage 
of unrelated individuals. Accordingly, the word community 
is beginning to take the syntax of personal and personified 
nouns, and to reject the article, while public, which we em- 
ploy in a sense implying less of common feeling and common 
interest than Latin usage ascribed to it, is uniformly con- 
strued with the article. The omission of the article before 
this noun, though not defensible, is not without a show of 
reason, and deserves less condemnation than ' is being built ' 
and ' in respect of J which are, with most of those who use 
them, at best but philological coxcombries. 

The history of the classical languages and literature 
affords little encouragement to those who hope for further 
substantial improvement in the English speech, or even to 
those who are striving to arrest its degeneracy and decay. 
The tongues of Hellas and Rome had each but a single era 
of vigor and perfection ; and the creative literature of Greece 
extends over a period but a hundred years longer than that 
which has elapsed since Chaucer sang. Six centuries com- 
prise all that has made the Grecian intellect immortal. 
Roman literature, essentially borrowed, or at least imitative, 
and commencing only after the oracles of Hellenic genius 
had ceased to give responses, flourished but half as long. So, 
in modern times, Italy was but three hundred years a power 
in the world of letters, and Spain had scarcely a longer age 
of intellectual activity. Germany, on the contrary, has an 
old literature, and a new, a Nibehmgenlied, and after six 
centuries, again a Faust ; and the present century affords evi- 
dence that the mind of the Anglican race is rousing itself to 



REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 665 

win new prizes in the arena of letters. There ^as one 
cause of decadence in the classical languages, which does not 
exist in those of the modern Gothic stock. Greece and Rome 
had no foreign fountains from which to draw, when their own 
were waxing turbid and dry, no old literature, no record of a 
primitive, half-forgotten language, no long-neglected but rich 
mine of linguistic wealth, whence the unwrought ores of 
speech could yet be extracted : and hence their literature 
died, because their tongues were consumed, their material 
exhausted. If such a fate awaits the genius and the language 
of the Anglican people, it is but the common lot of all things 
human ; but we are nevertheless far from the day when the 
resources of our maternal speech will all have been made 
available, and when nothing but stereotyped repetition will 
be left for our writers. The Saxon legions which the Norman 
irruption drove from the field may yet be rallied ; and, with 
the renovation of our language, we may still hope for a bless- 
ing which was denied to Hellas and Latium : the revival of 
the glories of a national literature. 



LECTURE XXX. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA. 

The English language in America is necessarily much 
affected by the multitude of new objects, processes, and habits 
of life that qualify our material existence in this new world, 
which, with sometimes incongruous architecture, we are 
building up out of the raw stock that nature has given us ; 
by the great influx of foreigners speaking different languages 
or dialects, who, in adopting our speech, cannot fail to com- 
municate to it some of the peculiarities of their own ; by 
climatic and other merely material causes which affect the 
action of the organs of articulation, and of course the form 
of spoken words ; by the generally diffused habit of reading, 
which makes pronunciation and phrase more formal and also 
more uniform ; and doubtless by other more obscure and yet 
undetected causes. 

Thus far, it can by no means be said that any distinct 
dialectic difference has established itself between England 
and the United States ; and it is a trite observation, that, 
though very few Americans speak as well as the educated 
classes of Englishmen, yet not only is the average of English 



LANGUAGE UNIFORM IN AMERICA. 667 

used here, both in speaking and writing, better than that of 
the great mass of the English people ; bnt there are fewer 
local peculiarities of form and articulation in our vast extent 
of territory than on the comparatively narrow soil of Great 
Britain. In spite of disturbing and distracting causes, Eng- 
lish is more emphatically one in America than in its native 
land ; and if we have engrafted on our mother-speech some 
wide-spread corruptions, we have very nearly freed the lan- 
guage, in our use of it, from some vulgar and disagreeable 
peculiarities exceedingly common in England. 

So far as any tendency to divergence between the two 
countries exists, it manifests itself at present, rather in the 
spoken than in the written dialect, in pronunciation rather 
than in vocabulary and grammatical structure. It can 
hardly be denied that a marked difference of accent is already 
observable ; but, though a very few words current on one side 
the Atlantic are either obsolete, or not yet introduced, upon 
the other, it would be difficult to frame a written sentence, 
which would be pronounced good English by competent 
judges in America, and condemned as unidiomatic in Eng- 
land. 

Some noticeable local and general differences between 
American and British English may be explained by the 
fact, that considerable bodies of Englishmen sometimes emi- 
grated from the same vicinity, and that in their new home 
they and their multiplied descendants have kept together 
and continued to employ dialectic peculiarities of their native 
speech, or retained words of general usage which elsewhere 
perished. Thus the inhabitants of Eastern Virginia were 
early settlers, and have intermixed little with the descend- 
ants of other colonists or strangers. Hence, they are said to 



668 COLLOQUIALISMS. 

retain some Shakespearean words not popularly known in 
other American or even English districts ; and the dialect of 
S,outh-E astern Massachusetts, which is inhabited by the un- 
mixed progeny of the first immigrants, is marked by corre- 
sponding individualities. It is to the influence of such causes 
that we owe some excellent words, which have now become 
universal in the United States, as, for example, the verb to 
wilt, which has strangely been suffered to perish in England, 
without leaving any substitute or equivalent behind it. 

In the use of colloquialisms, not only tolerated but pre- 
ferred hi conversation, though scarcely allowable in writing, 
the two nations differ considerably. "What our own self- 
indulgences are, in this respect, it is difficult for an American 
to say, because he becomes conscious of them, as national 
peculiarities, only when his attention is called to them by 
criticisms which good-breeding seldom permits an English- 
man to make. In England, on the other hand, an educated 
American hears, in the best circles, familiar expressions and 
grammatical licenses, which he would himself not venture to 
employ in America. For instance, he will most frequently 
hear it is me, and even it is him, instead of it is I, it is he. 
Some English grammarians think the former of these expres- 
sions defensible ; and, in the analogy of the French and Dan- 
ish languages, where the corresponding forms are not merely 
allowable, but obligatory, there lies an argument of some 
weight ; but this apparent grammatical solecism is not sanc- 
tioned by Anglo-Saxon usage, or the authority of good 
writers. 

The most important peculiarity of American English is a 
laxity, irregularity, and confusion in the use of particles. 
The same thing is, indeed, observable in England, but not to 



GRAMMATICAL DIFFERENCES. 669 

the same extent, though some gross departures from idio- 
matic propriety, such as different to, for different from, are 
common in England, which none but very ignorant persons 
would be guilty of in America. These may seem trifling 
matters, and in languages abounding in inflections, they 
might be so ; but in a syntax, depending, like ours, so much 
upon the right use of particles, strict accuracy in this partic- 
ular becomes seriously important. 

In the tenses of the verbs, I am inclined to think that 
well-educated Americans conform more closely to grammat- 
ical propriety than the corresponding class in England. At 
least, the proper use of the compound preterite is more gen- 
eral with us. In English writers of some pretensions, we 
meet such phrases as ' this plate has been engraved by Albert 
Diirer,' ' this palace has been designed by Michael Angelo, 
for was engraved, was designed. Such an abuse of the 
proper office of the preterite is never heard in America. In 
general, I think we may say, that in point of naked syn- 
tactical accuracy, the English of America is not at all inferior 
to that of England ; but we do not discriminate so precisely 
in the meaning of words, nor do we habitually, in either con- 
versation or in writing, express ourselves so gracefully, or 
employ so classic a diction, as the English. Our taste in 
language is less fastidious, and our licenses and inaccuracies 
are more frequently of a character indicative of want of re- 
finement and elegant culture, than those we hear in educated 
society in England. 

The causes of the differences in pronunciation are partly 
physical, and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to resist ; 
and partly owing to a difference of circumstances. Of this 
latter class of influences, the universality of reading in Amer- 



670 PRONUNCIATION. 

ica is the most obvious and important The most marked 
difference is, perhaps, in the length, or prosodical quantity, 
of the vowels ; and both the causes I have mentioned concur 
to produce this effect. We are said to drawl our words by 
protracting the vowels, and giving them a more diphthongal 
sound than the English. Xow, an Englishman who reads, 
will habitually utter his vowels more fully and distinctly 
than his countryman who does not ; and, upon the same prin- 
ciple, a nation of readers, like the Americans, will pronounce 
more deliberately and clearly than a people, so large a pro- 
portion of whom are unable to read, as in England. Erom 
our universal habit of reading, there results not only a 
greater distinctness of articulation, but a strong tendency to 
assimilate the spoken to the written language. Thus Amer- 
icans incline to give to every syllable of a written word a dis- 
tinct enunciation ; and the popular habit is to say dic-tion- 
<w-y, ?nil-it-ar-y, with a secondary accent on the penultimate, 
instead of sinking the third syllable, as is so common in Eng- 
land. Tli ere is no doubt something disagreeably stiff in an 
anxious and affected conformity to the very letter of orthog- 
raphy ; and to those accustomed to a more hurried utterance, 
we may seem to drawl, when we are only giving a full ex- 
pression to letters, which, though etymologically important, 
the English habitually slur over, sputtering out, as a Swedish 
satirist says, one-half of the word, and swallowing the other. 
The tendency to make the long vowels diphthongal is noticed 
by foreigners as a peculiarity of the orthoepy of our lan- 
guage ; and this tendency will, of course, be strengthened by 
any cause which produces greater slowness and fulness of 
articulation. Besides the influence of the habit of reading, 
there is some reason to think that climate is affecting oui 



PRONUNCIATION. 



671 



articulation. Id spite of the greater coldness of our winters, 
our flora shows that the climate of even our Northern States 
belongs, upon the whole, to a more Southern type than that 
of England. In Southern latitudes, at least within the tem- 
perate zone, articulation is generally much more distinct 
than in Northern regions. Witness the pronunciation of 
Spanish, Italian, Turkish, as compared with English, Danish, 
and German. Participating, then, in the physical influences 
of a Southern climate, we have contracted something of the 
more distinct articulation that belongs to a dry atmosphere, 
and a clear sky. And this view of the case is confirmed by 
the fact that the inhabitants of the Southern States incline, 
like the people of Southern Europe, to throw the accent 
towards the end of the word ; and thus, like all nations that 
use that accentuation, bring out all the syllables. This we 
observe very commonly in the comparative Northern and 
Southern pronunciation of proper names. I might exemplify 
by citing familiar instances ; but, lest that should be invidious, 
it may suffice to say that, not to mention more important 
changes, many a Northern member of Congress goes to 
Washington a dactyl or a trochee, and comes home an amphi- 
brach or an iambus. Why or how external physical causes, 
as climate and modes of life, should afTect pronunciation, we 
cannot say ; but it is evident that material influences of some 
sort are producing a change in our bodily constitution, and 
we are fast acquiring a distinct national Anglo- American 
type. That the delicate organs of articulation should partici- 
pate in such tendencies, is altogether natural ; and the opera- 
tion of the causes which give rise to them, is palpable even 
in our hand-writing, which, if not uniform with itself, is gen* 



672 PRONUNCIATION. 

eraliy, nevertheless, so unlike common English script as to 
be readily distinguished from it. 

To the joint operation, then, of these two causes, universal 
reading and climatic influences, we must ascribe our habit 
of dwelling upon vowel and diphthongal sounds, or drawling, 
if that term be insisted upon. This peculiarity, it must be 
admitted, is sufficiently disagreeable, particularly to a deli- 
cate and fastidious native ear, to which natural sensitiveness 
and intimate familiarity have rendered the language intelli- 
gible enough, even when not pronounced with marked dis- 
tinctness ; but it is often noticed by foreigners as both making 
us more readily understood by them in speaking our own 
tongue, and as connected with a flexibility of organ, which 
enables us to acquire a better pronunciation of other languages 
than is usual with Englishmen.* In any case, as, in spite 
of the old adage, speech is given us that we may make our- 
selves understood, our drawlmg, however prolonged, is pre- 
ferable to the nauseous, foggy, mumbling thickness of articu- 
lation which characterizes the cockney, and is 'not unfre- 
quently affected by Englishmen of a better class. 

It is to the same tendency to a prolonged and conse- 
quently distinct pronunciation of the vowels, that we are to 
ascribe the general retention of some, and the partial preser- 
vation of other, vowel sounds in America, now pretty uni- 

* The influence of the habit of full and distinct articulation in the orthoepy 
of the native language upon our pronunciation of foreign tongues, is well exem- 
plified in the readiness with which Italians acquire a good English accent. None 
of the Romance, or even Gothic nations, learn to speak English so well as the 
Italians. The same remark applies with great force to the Turks. The articula- 
tion of the Turkish is so distinct, that upon first hearing it, you follow the 
speaker, syllable by syllable. The Turks acquire the sounds of foreign tongues 
with great facility. The common seal-engravers of Constantinople, upon hearing 
a foreign name, will at once repeat it, and write it down for engraving, with as 
close a conformity to the true pronunciation as the Arabic alphabet admits of. 



PRONUNCIATION. 673 

foraaly banished out of the orthoepy of English writers on 
pronunciation, though not yet quite out of the actual speech 
of the British people. One of these is the sound of o in none, 
intermediate between the participle known and the noun nun. 
This is rather peculiar to New England, and is used in coat, 
which is not made to rhyme with quote or boat, and in many 
other words. The other is the long e in there, which Walker 
and his sequela make identical with a in fate. This latter 
sound, as I have before remarked, is by most Continental 
phonologists justly regarded as distinct from the a in fate, 
and as properly the long vowel corresponding to the short a 
in carry / but it seems destined to extinction, and America is 
in this respect following the example of England. 

There is, in many parts of the United States, a strange 
confusion with regard to the use of the letter r. Indeed, 
scarcely any consonantal sound undergoes so many modifica- 
tions in pronunciation in different countries as this. In some 
languages it is pronounced with a vibration of the uvula, and 
is at the same time distinctly guttural ; in others, it is articu- 
lated with a rapid vibration of the tongue, and a strong emis- 
sion of the breath ; in the Sandwich Islands it is scarcely 
distinguishable from I, and though marked by the rough 
breathing in some parts of the British islands, in others it is 
but an aspiration almost as inarticulate as A. The Romans 
called this consonant the litera canina, the snarling letter, 
and the modern Italians pronounce it with a very forcible 
trill. I believe the pronunciation I mentioned as character- 
istic of some American districts, is not peculiar to the United 
States, but occurs also in England. It consists in suppress- 
ing the r where it should be heard, and adding it where it 
should not. One need not go a day's journey from New 

York to find educated persons who call the municipal rule 
43 



674 PRONUNCIATION. 

of action the tor, and yet style the passage from ( ne room to 
another a cloak. 

Analogous to this are two English vulgarisms, from which 
we are almost wholly free. ~No American young lady la- 
ments that she " never knows when to hexasperate the haitch; " 
nor is any cis-atlantic Weller embarrassed as to whether he 
shall spell veal with a we. To ears accustomed to discrimi- 
nate between the use and omission of the h, and between the 
letters v and w, it seems strange that they can ever be con- 
founded ; but I believe they are nowhere so clearly distin- 
guished as in the United States. The Greeks and Romans, 
as I have observed in a former lecture, had the same embar- 
rassment as the vulgar English with respect to the h; and it 
finally disappeared from the articulation of the Southern 
Romance languages altogether. "Were it not for the influence 
of printing, the rough breathing of the h would probably 
long before this have ceased to be heard in English ; and it is 
to the same cause alone that we are to ascribe the perpetua- 
tion of the distinction between the v and the w, one or the 
other of which has become obsolete in the pronunciation of 
most languages which originally possessed them both. 

But to return : there are other differences between our 
American accent, and that of the English, which are as yet 
too fleeting and subtile to admit of definition ; and in fact we 
differ as widely among ourselves in this particular as any of 
us do from the people of Great Britain. So far as these 
shades of articulation can be characterized, they seem to me 
to lie chiefly in the intonation ; and I think no Eastern man 
can hear a native of the Mississippi Yalley use the O voca- 
tive, or observe the Southern pronunciation of ejaculatory or 
other emphatic phrases, without perceiving a very marked 



TENDENCIES TO DIVERGENCE. 675 

though often indescribable, difference between their and our 
utterance of the same things. 

The integrity, and future harmonious development of our 
common Anglican speech in England and America, is threat- 
ened by a multitude of disturbing influences. Language, 
being a living organic thing, is, by the very condition of its 
vital existence, by the law of life itself, necessarily always in a 
progressive, or at least a fluctuating state. To fix it, there- 
fore, to petrify it into immutable forms, is impossible ; and, 
were it possible, would be fatal to it as a medium of inter- 
communication suited to the ever-changeful life of man. But, 
at the same time, something can and should be done to check 
its propensity to wandering growth, and especially the too 
rapid divergence of what may ultimately become the two 
great dialects of the English tongue. At present, the pre- 
dominance of the commercial and the political over the social 
relations of the two countries, makes the unity of our written 
speech especially important ; but the wonderful increase in 
the facilities of travel, destined perhaps to be superseded by 
other still swifter conveyances, is constantly multiplying the 
means and the occasions of personal communication between 
the two peoples ; and, indeed, we are already in time, almost 
in space, nearer to England than to the remoter borders of 
our own wide-spread empire. The sea is, even now, no longer 
what Horace found the Adriatic — a gulf of dissociation — but a 
bond of union, a pathway of rapid intercommunion, and, with 
increased frequency of individual intercourse, grows also the 
importance of the identity of our spoken tongue. Let me, 
therefore, express my entire dissent from the views of those 
who would imbitter the rivalries of commerce by the jealousies 
of a discordant dialect — who would hasten the process of sepa- 
ration betw^n the stock and the off-shoot, and cut off the sons 



676 



TENDENCIES TO DIVEKOENCE. 



of the Pilgrim and the Cavalier from their common inheritance 
in Chaucer and Spenser, and Bacon and Shakespeare, and Mil- 
ton and Fuller, by Americanizing, and consequently denatural- 
izing, the language in which our forefathers have spoken, and 
prayed, and sung, for a thousand years. If we cannot pre- 
vent so sad a calamity, let us not voluntarily accelerate it. 
Let us not, with malice prepense, go about to republicanize 
our orthography and our syntax, our grammars and our dic- 
tionaries, our nursery hymns and our Bibles, until, by the 
force of irresistible influences, our language shall have revo- 
lutionized itself. When our own metaphysical inquirers shall 
establish a wiser philosophy than that of Bacon ; when a 
Columbian Shakespeare shall awake to create a new and 
transcendent genus of dramatic composition ; and when the 
necessities of a loftier inspiration shall impel our home-born 
bards to the framing of a nobler diction than the poetic dia- 
lect of Albion, it will be soon enough to repudiate that com- 
munity of speech, which, in spite of the keenly conflicting 
interests of politics and of commerce, makes us still one with 
the people of England. 

The inconveniences resulting from the existence of local 
dialects are very serious obstacles to national progress, to 
the growth of a comprehensive and enlightened patriotism, 
to the creation of a popular literature, and to the diffusion of 
general culture. In a state where the differences of speech 
are numerous and great, the community is divided into so 
many disjointed fragments, that the notion of a common- 
wealth can scarcely be developed ; for speech is the great 
medium of sympathy between man and man ; and even the 
animosities of rival religions are not more deep-seated and 
irreconcilable than the jealousies and repugnancies, which 
never fail to exist between neighboring peoples who have no 



DIALECTS. 677 

common tongue. Where there are numerous dialects, but 
few can be so far cultivated as to possess a living literature, 
and many even will exist only in the form of unwritten 
speech. Poverty, want of opportunity, sectional pride, will 
prevent most of those who have no written language from 
acquiring the dialect of their more fortunate neighbors who 
possess a literature ; and but few intelligent philanthropists 
will occupy themselves with the intellectual or the spiritual 
interests of those with whom, though of the same race, and 
the same commonwealth, they can communicate only through 
an interpreter. What we regard as distortions of our mother- 
tongue are more offensive to us than the widest diversities 
between it and unallied languages ; and we regard a fellow- 
citizen who speaks a marked provincial English with a con- 
tempt and aversion, which we do not bestow upon the 
foreigner who speaks no English at all. The unhappy jeal- 
ousies which have a hundred times defeated the hopes of 
Italian patriots, are very intimately connected with their dif- 
ferences of language. Every province, every great city has 
its dialect, often unintelligible, always ridiculous, to the na- 
tives of a different locality, and one finds in the popular 
literature of Italy — as, for instance, in the Secchia Rapita — 
frequent exhibitions of a mutual hate, apparently imbittered 
quite as much by differences of speech, as by rivalries of 
interest. Of course, all educated persons know the Tuscan, 
which the great Florentines, Dante and Petrarch and Bocca- 
cio, made the language of literature ; but, as Byron says, 

" Few Italians speak the right Etruscan ; " 

and in Sicily, the people repudiate not only the Tuscan dia- 
lect, but the Italian name. Fifteen or twenty of the provin- 
cial dialects have been reduced to writing, and more or lesa 



678 LINGUISTIC CHANGE. 

made known by the press ; but one only has become a tae- 
dium of communication beyond its own native borders. 
Every Italian, then, has two languages, one for bis home, his 
fireside, his friends, the narrow plain or valley or mountain 
he calls his country ; another, for all the world without ; 
and he bestows the unkindly name of foreigner upon even his 
brother Italian, whose speech bewrays him as a native of an 
adjacent province. 

The inconveniences of local dialects are infinite to the 
people of a country divided by them ; and nothing but per- 
sonal observation can enable us to realize the annoyances of 
a traveller who, desiring to extend his observations beyond 
the sphere of the hotel and the museum, and to learn some- 
thing of the rural and domestic life of the people, finds his 
curiosity hourly baffled by the impossibility of free commu- 
nication with the humble classes, in many European coun- 
tries, where the dialect changes almost at every post. 

The philanthropist may extract some consolation out of 
this confusion, in the reflection that the want of a community 
of speech, in countries of ancient, deep-rooted and fixed insti- 
tutions, though a great, is not an unmixed, evil. Like the 
corresponding peculiarities of local costume, occupation, and 
habits, it has its use in the scheme of Providence, as a means 
of checking the spread of popular excitements, and a too 
rapid movement of social changes, which, though ultimately 
beneficial, yet, like the rains of heaven, produce their best 
effect, when neither very hastily precipitated, nor very fre- 
quently repeated. 

We cannot, upon either side of the ocean, expect to be 
exempt from that general law of language, which, more than 
any tiling else, argues it to be man's work, not his nature — 
the law of perpetual change. Man himself is immortal, 



DIALECTS. 679 

immutable. His passions, his appetites, his powers, are 
everywhere and at all times, in kind, almost in degree, sub- 
stantially the same ; but whatsoever he fashions is infinite in 
variety of structure, frail in architecture, unstable in form, 
and transitory in duration. All this is eminently true of his 
language, and therefore, I repeat, to this law our speech 
must bow. But we may still avail ourselves of a great va- 
riety of means and circumstances peculiar to modern society, 
to retard the decay of our tongue, and to prevent its dissipa- 
tion into a multitude of independent dialects. 

The original causes of dialectic difference are very ob- 
scure ; and, with the exception of those which depend on the 
physical influences of climate, they are usually very restricted 
in their territorial range. In countries naturally divided into 
numerous districts separated by mountains, rivers, marshes, 
or other obstacles to free intercommunication, every isolated 
locality has usually its own peculiarities of speech, more or 
less distinctly marked in proportion as the community is 
more or less cut off from intercourse with the nation at large. 
As the construction of roads, canals, and other means of 
transport, opens new channels and increased facilities of com- 
merce, these peculiarities disappear ; and in all parts of the 
civilized world, such internal improvements are rapidly ex- 
tending, and numerous local dialects, and even some inde- 
pendent languages, seem doomed to a speedy extinction. 

The causes which tend to extirpate existing dialectic pe- 
culiarities are even more powerfully influential in prevent- 
ing the formation of diversities ; and the physical character 
of our own territory is such as to encourage the hope that 
our speech, which, if not absolutely homogeneous, is now 
employed by 25,000,000 of men, in one unbroken mass, with 
a uniformity of which there is perhaps no other example, will 



680 HARMONIZING INFLUENCES. 

escape that division which has shattered some languages of 
the Old World into fragments like those of the confusion of 
Babel. The geography of the United States presents few 
localities suited to human habitation, that are at the same time 
inaccessible to modern improved modes of communication. 
The carriage-road, the railway, the telegraph, the mails, the 
newspaper, penetrate to every secluded nook, address them- 
selves to every free inhabitant, and speak everywhere one 
and the same dialect. 

Independently of the influences of physical improve- 
ment, or rather, perhaps, as a fruit of it, there are circum- 
stances in the condition of modern society which are con- 
stantly active in the eradication of its minor differences, 
and in producing a general amalgamation of all its con- 
stituents, and a harmony between all instrumentalities not 
inherently discordant. Men, though individually less sta- 
tionary, less attached to locality, are becoming more gre- 
garious in the mass ; the social element is more active, the 
notion of the solidarity and essential unity of particular na- 
tions, if not of the race, is more a matter of general conscious- 
ness ; the interests of different classes and districts are more 
closely interwoven, and the operations of governments are 
more comprehensive and diffused than at any former histor- 
ical epoch. Look, for instance, at the influence of the mone- 
tary corporations connected with finance, with internal im- 
provements, with fire-insurance, and with manufactures. 
The negotiability of their capital diffuses their proprietorship 
through wide regions of territory, through all classes of 
society. Their administration requires frequent communica- 
tion between their shareholders, and between the direction 
and its numerous agents, as well as with the millions who in 
one way and another are affected by their operations, and 



INFLUENCE OF FEINTING. 681 

thus every one of these corporations, mischievous as in many 
respects their influence is, serves as a bond of connection, a 
means and an occasion of more intimate communication be- 
tween city and country, rude and cultivated, rich and poor. 
Add to these our great charities, the crowning glory of this 
age, which combine the efforts, harmonize the sympathies, 
and bring together in free communion thousands, who, but 
for such attractions, had never been led to act or think or 
speak in unison ; and further, our political associations, which 
gather their annual myriads to listen to the living voice of 
eloquence from the mouth of one orator nursed on the banks 
of the Mississippi, of another who learned his English in 
the lumber camps of Maine, and of a third who dwells by 
the lakes of the great North- West — all speaking, and so all 
teaching, one dialect of one tongue. In like manner, our 
Government, acting through its army, its navy, its revenue- 
service, its post office, is continually mingling, in all its de- 
partments, the separate ingredients of our population, com- 
muning daily with the remotest corners, everywhere employ- 
ing, and forcing all alike to employ one form of syntax, one 
standard of speech, one medium of thought. 

I believe the art of printing, and especially the periodical 
press, together with the general diffusion of education, which 
the press alone has made possible, is the most efficient instru- 
mentality in producing uniformity of language and extir- 
pating distinctions of dialect. With modern facilities of 
transit and transport, and the present great tendency to cen- 
tralization, the leading city periodicals are sure of almost 
universal circulation. They are more read and more quoted 
than any other sources of information. The improved accu- 
racy of reporters makes the newspapers channels through 



INFLUENCE OF PRINTING. 

which not the thoughts only, but almost the very accents of 
popular speakers, are published to the nation ; and so swift is 
our postal communication, that words uttered to-day by a 
great orator in New York, are repeated to-morrow in every 
hamlet of a territory as large as the Spanish peninsula. 

The influence of printing, and of a general ability to read, 
in first producing, and then maintaining, a uniformity of dia- 
lect, is remarkably and curiously exemplified in the Christian 
population of Hellas and Asia Minor. 

The modern Greeks, as they are called, for reasons of con- 
venience, and because of their community of speech, are a 
people, or rather group of fragments of peoples, very diverse 
in their origin, and very much scattered in their abodes, ex- 
tending through the whole Turkish empire, as well as the 
Hellenic territory proper, living in small communities, often 
separated by wide distances or by impassable natural bar- 
riers, surrounded by tribes speaking very different languages, 
and therefore exposed to continual and discordant corruptions 
of speech ; and having, moreover, hi general, little relation- 
ship to the old Hellenic race, no common political interests, 
and little social or commercial intercourse. Their only bond 
of real union is their creed, which among them supplies the 
same place that community of blood does in other nations. 
The ancient Greeks, occupying the same localities, much 
more nearly allied in blood, more closely connected politi- 
cally, possessing greater facilities and motives for personal 
intercommunication, often gathering from their remotest col- 
onies at the great metropolitan festivals of Athens, of Corinth, 
and other Hellenic cities, and, above all, possessed of a com- 
mon literature, whose choicest dainties were the daily bread 
of every Greek intellect, nevertheless, not only spoke, but 



INFLUENCE OF PRINTING. 683 

wrote, in dialects distinguished by palpable differences of 
articulation, inflection, syntax and vocabulary. The modern 
Greeks, on the other hand, both speak and write, not indeed 
with entire uniformity, but, saving some limited, though re- 
markable local exceptions, yet with a general similarity of 
dialect, that is very seldom found in languages whose terri- 
torial range is so great. 

Now, the influence which has been most active in pro- 
ducing this remarkable uniformity, is the circulation of 
printed books and journals employing the same vocabulary, 
and following the same orthography and the same syntax. 
Like effects have resulted from the same cause in Germany. 
The dialects are dying out, just in proportion as the more 
general dissemination of instruction multiplies readers, and 
encourages the diffusion of printed matter. If printing has 
not yet conferred the same benefit upon Italy, it is because 
the detestable tyrannies, under which the peninsula has 
groaned for centuries, have fettered the press and excluded 
the masses from the advantages of education. Where there 
are neither books nor journals, there can be no readers ; and 
where language is not controlled and harmonized by litera- 
ture, the colloquial speech will be variable, irregular and dis- 
crepant. 

Of all countries known in history, the North American 
republic is most conspicuously marked by the fusion, or 
rather the absence of rank and social distinctions, by com- 
munity of interests, by incessant and all-pervading intercom- 
munication, by the universal diffusion of education, and the 
abundant facilities of access, not only to the periodical con- 
duits, but to the permanent reservoirs of knowledge. The 
condition of England is in all these respects closely assimi- 
lated to that of the United States ; and not only the methods, 



684 INFLUENCE OF PRINTING. 

but the instruments, of popular instruction are fast becoming 
the same in both ; and there is a growing conviction among 
the wise of the two great empires, that the highest interests 
of both will be promoted by reciprocal good will and unre- 
stricted intercourse, perilled by jealousies and estrangement. 
Favored, then, by the mighty elective affinities, the pow- 
erful harmonic attractions, which subsist between the Amer- 
icans and the Englishmen as brothers of one blood, one 
speech, one faith, we may reasonably hope that the Anglican 
tongue on both sides of the Atlantic, as it grows in flexibil- 
ity, comprehensiveness, expression, wealth, will also more 
and more clearly manifest the organic unity of its branches, 
and that national jealousies, material rivalries, narrow inter- 
ests, will not disjoin and shatter that great instiument of 
social advancement, which God made one, as he made one 
the spirit of the nations that use it. 



685 



APPENDIX 



1. P. 30. L y d e n , a Saxon word for language. 

There is a confusion between the Saxon lyden, (lseden or leden,) the 
Old English leden, and the national appellative Latin, a parallel to which is found 
also in modern Spanish. Lyden, (laeden or leden,) seems to be allied to 
the Anglo-Saxon hlyd, gehlyd, a sound, and h 1 u d , loud, to the Danish 
L y d , the Swedish 1 j u d , and the German L a u t , (noun,) and 1 a u t , (adjective,) 
all involving the same idea ; and probably also to the Icelandic h lj 6 5 , a sound, 
a song, a trumpet ; which latter word also signifies, oddly, the absence of sound» 
namely, silence. The three Saxon forms of this word are employed also for 
Latin. Either this is a confusion of meaning arising from similarity of form, or 
lyden is a derivative of Latin, as the language par excellence, and so not 
allied to the other Gothic words above cited, unless, indeed, we suppose Latin 
itself to be derived from a root meaning an articulate sound, or language. In 
Spanish, especially in the Spanish colonies, an African or Indian who has learned 
Spanish, and acquired some of the arts of civilization, so as to make him useful 
as a servant, is called ladino, and Old Castilian was sometimes styled Ladino. 
On the other hand, Latin was used in Catalan to signify a foreign language gen- 
erally. Thus in B. D'Esclot, cap. xxxv. : li vench denant lo rey, e agenollas a ell, 
e saludal en son la ti;" and cap. xxxviii. : " e cridaren molt fortement en llur 
1 a t i ; " "en son 1 a t i , " and " en llur 1 a t i ," signifying resp. lively, in his lan- 
guage, in their language, which in this case was Arabic. Latin was also very 
commonly employed in the same sense in Old French and Italian. From this 
use of the word, m u y ladino came to mean, in Spanish, a great linguist, one 
knowing many foreign languages. The Old English latiner, by corruption 



686 APPENDIX. 

latimer, an interpreter or dragoman, is of similar derivation. Thus, in Richard 
Coer de Lion, Weber ii. 97. 

Anon stoode up her latymer 

And aunsweryd Aleyn Trenchemer. 

2. P. 30. Etymology of Gospel. 

The phrases, godspell that guoda, the good gospel, Heliand, 1, 17, 
and spel godes, the word of God, H. 17, 13, 41, 15, 19 and 81, 8, seem to 
show that in the Continental Old-Saxon, g o d - s p e 1 1 was derived from god, 
God, and spell. Schilter adapts the same etymology for the gotspellon 
of Tatian; gotspellota themo folke, evangelizabat populo, c. xiii. 25 ; 
zi gotspellone Gotes rihhi, evangelizare regnum Dei, c. xxii. 4, as 
also for gotspel, predigonti gotspel rihhes, praedicans evangelium 
regni, xxii. 1. 

3. P. 33. Sign of parity or brotherhood. 

Dampier, voyages, 1703, i. 359, says: "They (the people of Mindanao) 
would always be praising the English, as declaring that the English and the 
Mindanaians were all one. This they exprest by putting their two fore-fingers 
close together, and saying that the English and Mindanaians were samo, samo, 
that is all one." 

In the curious Livre des Faits de Jean Bouciquaut, P. I. c. xxv., it is stated 
that when the French knights were taken prisoners by the Turks, at the battle 
of Nicopolis, the Count de Nevers saved Boucicaut from execution by claiming 
him as a brother, or near friend, by the same sign : " Si l'advisa Dieu tout 
soubdainement dejoindre les deux doigts ensemble de ses deux mains en regardant 
le Basat, et fit signe qu'il luy estoit comme son propre frere et qu'il le rcpitast ; 
lequel signe le Basat entendit tantot, et le fit laisser." 

4. P. 45. Use of dative, plural or singular, as name of Scandinavian towns. 
In Old-Northern it was very common to use the dative in naming a place, in 

constructions where the idiom of other languages would require the nominative. 
Thus, instead of saying, ' that estate was called Steinn,' it was more usual to 
employ the dative ; s&bserhet dStei7ii, that estate was called, at Steinn. 
So, b a r e r heitir i Ripum , at a place called Ripar. In Vatnsdaela Saga, 
k. 16, we have, d Hrutastoftum het pat er Hruti bio, it was called at 
Ilrutastaftar, where Hruti lived ; in the Saga of Finnbogi hinn rami, k. 3, h ann 
bio par sera heitir at Toptum, he lived where it is called at Toptar ; 
in Magnusar god"a Saga, k. 52, bj 6 * * bar sem a Stohkum heitir, 



APPENDIX. 687 

majr * * er bet p r a n d r , there lived, where it is called at Stokkar, a man 
who hight Thrand. Such examples might be multiplied by hundreds. 

5. P. 58. Menage's etymologies. 

A French epigrammatist says, upon one of Menage's derivations: 

Alphana vient ftequus, sans doute, 
Mais il faut avouer aussi 
Qu'en venant de la jusqu'ici 
II a bien change sur la route. 

6. P. 64. Portuguese word s a u d a d e . 

The Portuguese, as appears from a passage in the Leal Conselheiro of King 
Dom Duarte, prided themselves on this word as early as the fifteenth century. 

Se algua pessoa por meu servico e mandado de mym se parte, e della sento 
s u y d a d e , certo e que de tal partyda nom ey sanha, nojo, pesar, desprazer, 
nem avorrecymento, ca prazme de seer, e pesarmya se nom fosse; e por se 
partir alguas vezes vem tal s u y d a d e que faz chorar, e sospirar como se fosse 
de nojo. E porem me parece este nome de suydade tarn proprio que o 
latym, nem outra linguagem que eu saiba, nom he pera tal sentido semelhante. 

Zeal Conselheiro, Paris, 1842, p. 151. 

The editor of the Leal Conselheiro quotes a curious passage to the same 
effect from Dom Francisco Manoel. Epanaphoras, 1675, pp. 286, 287. 

The orthography, saudade, became established about the beginning of 
the sixteenth century. The forms, s o i d a d e and soedade, which occur in 
early Portuguese writers, countenance the derivation from Lat. solus, but the 
existence of a similar noun, as well as of cognate verbs of allied signification, in 
the Scandinavian languages, suggests the possibility that they all belong alike to 
some Gothic radical. 

Ihre thinks the Scandinavian words may be from the root of the verb to seek, 
in analogy with a figurative sense of the Latin q u as r e r e , and cites this 
couplet from Horace, Carm. iii. 24. 

Virtutem incolumem odimus ; 
Sublatam ex oculis q u ae r i m u s invidi. 

Here q u se r i m u s means regret, miss, long for, and this use of the word is 
common in the classic writers. 

7. P. 67. Etymology of Granada. 

This derivation of Granada was, I believe, first suggested by Calepin, 
and it is adopted by Facciolati, and by some Spanish authors, as, for example, 
by Pellicer, El Fenix, 34, E, but the name has been generally supposed to be of 



688 APPENDIX. 

Arabic origin. In the chronicles of the Middle Ages, it is generally written 
Gernatha or Garnatha, and upon the supposition that this is the true 
orthography, various absurd Arabic etymologies have been suggested, but as it 
appears from the Espafia Sagrada, new edition, vol. xxix., pp. 201, 209, that 
Granada in Catalonia was called Granatum in the tenth and eleventh 
centuries, I think that the form Garnatha is a Moorish corruption, and that 
Calepin's conjecture is probably well founded. 

8. P. 69. Tyrian purple produced by shell-fish. 

Aelfric, Homilies, ii., 253-1, uses wolcn-read for scarlet in giving the 
narrative of the Passion, where Matth. xxvii. 28 has, in the Greek text, 
XAo/xuSa KOKKivi]v. Wolcn, wolcen, weoluc, weolc, the modern 
Eng. whelk, is a shell-fish, in this case, the Tyrian murex. This root is employed 
in Anglo-Saxon in many compounds denoting purple or scarlet, and the Angh> 
Saxons must of course have been acquainted with the source from which the 
ancient purples were obtained. 

9. P. 70. Various colors obtained from the murex. 

Many shades of Tyrian purple are enumerated in Pliny. Nat. Hist., ix. 62, 
65, (Holland's Trans., ix. 38-41.) 

10. P. 70. Sky in sense of cloud. 

* * * a certeine winde * 
That blewe so hidously and hie, 
That it ne left not a skie 

In all the welkin long and brode. 

Chaucer, House of Fame, iii. 508-511. 

* * * all sodeinly 

She passeth as it were a skie 
All cleue out of this ladies sight. 

Gower, Conf. Amant. iv., Pauli's ed., ii. 50. 

* * * Aurora, which afore the sunne 
Is wont t' enchase the blacke skyes dunne. 

Lydgate, in Troy-Boke, Warton, II. xxiii. 

The purpour sone * * * 

Throw goldin skyis putting up his head. 

Idem, Warton, II. xxx. 

The Promptorium Parvulorum has : " Hovyfi yii the eyre, asbyrdys, [bryddys,] 
or skyis, or other lyke, &c. 



APPENDIX. 689 

11. P. 71. Color of the cheek. 

There is a curious discussion in Athenaeus, xiii. 8, on the propriety of the 
application of the epithet purple to the cheek, in the verse of Phrynichus : 

Act/iTrei 5 s iirl iropcpvpeais iraprftcri <pws epwros; 

and that of Simonides : 

Tlop<pvp4ov airb a-rSfiaros U?<ra <paovav irapQsvos, 

the former of which, no doubt, suggested to Gray hia 

purple light of love, 

and to earlier poets the similar expressions collected in Mitford's edition of 
Gray. 

12. P. 72. Dyeing in grain meant dyeing with grain. 

" There is another sort of Tunalls which * * * beares another commo- 
ditie and profit, which is of the graine, for that certaine small wormes breede in 
the leaues of this tree, * * * and this is that Indian Cochenille so famous, 
and wherewith they die in graine." Purchas, iii. 95*7. Cochineal yields colors 
much like those obtained from coccum orgrana. Hence the name of 
grain was applied to it, and this passage among many others shows that dyeing 
in grain meant dyeing with coccum or grana, or with cochineal. 

To the same purpose are the following expressions to which a friend refers 
me in Hackluyt, ed. 1589 : " violets in graine and fine reds be most worne ; " 
"violets died in graine with purple colors and fine reds," p. 380; " Graine that 
you dye scarlet withall," 383. 

13. P. 73. Dyed in grain, in the sense of dyed with fast color. 

The French employ both cramoisi, crimson, from k e r m e s , grain, and 
e c a r 1 a t e , scarlet, much in the same way. Bleu cramoisi meant, in Old 
French, deep blue, ecarlate noir, deep black, and we find in Foulques Fitz 
Warin, p. 70, "e se vestirent de un escarlet vert," and dressed in deep 
green. So in Kyng Alisaunder, which was translated from the French, 

v. 4986-7 : 

Thy clothen hem with grys and ermyne 
With golde and siluer and skarlet pers fine ; 

where skarlet pers means deep blue. 

In both languages, these words are used figuratively in an analogous sense. 
A rogue in grain is a thoroughly corrupt knave. Etre sot ou laid en cra- 
moisi is, to be thoroughly foolish or ugly, and Cotgrave gives "sot en 
44 



690 APPENDIX. 

c r a m o i s i , an ass in grain." Rabelais, V. xlvi., has e 11 c r a m o i s i for per- 
fectly : " Par sainct Ian ie rhythmeray comme les aultres, ie le sens bien ; 
attendez, et mayez pour excuse si ie ne rbythme en cramoysy." 
The verb ingrain originally signified dyed with grain : 

Hire robe was ful riche 
Of reed scarlet engreyned. 

Piers Ploughman, Vision, 908. 

14. P, 88. Grammarians not good writers: 

The Greeks had a proverbial saying: afiaOeo-Tepov (ppdtrop ko.1 acupevrepov, 
*' speak less learnedly and plainer," which may well be applied to the style of 
most persons devoted to the study of grammar. 

15. P. 112. Practice of poetical writers. 

Nos consuetudine [loquendi] prohibemur; poeta jus suum tenuit et dixit 

audacius. 

Cicero, Tusc. Disp., III. 9. 

16. P. 123. Etymology of law. 

We find in the Saxon Chronicle, MLXXXVIL, an expression very similar to 
that quoted in the text from the Edda, and, in near connection with it, the verb 
set tan in the same sense as the Ger. setzen, to appointor decree: "He 
saette mycel deorfriS, and he laegde laga paer wid", pat swa hwa swa sloge 
lieort oftSe hinde, pat hine man sceolde blendian. * * Eac he saette be 
pam haran, pat hi mosten freo faran." 

I know not why we should question the etymological relationship between 
laegde and laga, and if these words are connected, there is no reason for 
going to the Latin for the derivation of law. 

17. P. 131. Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons before the creation of a 
national literature. 

Beowulf, and some other Saxon poems, contain strong internal evidence of 
having been, in part at least, composed before the diffusion of Christianity 
among the Anglo Saxons. But in the form in which we have the poem of Beo- 
wulf, it is indisputably of a later date, nor is there any sufficient ground for sup- 
posing that it was written down in the heathen period. Whether it previously 
existed otherwise than as a prose saga, we have no means of determining ; and, 
as a poetical composition, it is, primd facie at least, the work of a Christian bard. 
• 18. P. 136. Comparison of adjectives. 

Even the names of the cardinal points were formerly sometimes compared by 
the augmentative method. Thus, in the curiously minute account of the comet 



APPENDIX. 691 

of the eleventh year of Edward IV. in Warkworth's Chronicle, printed by the 

Cam. Soc., it is said : * * tJ and it arose ester and ester, till it arose full este, 

and rather and rather." P. 22. 

19. P. 136. Comparison of adjectives. 

Gil lays down these rules for the comparison of adjectives: 

Per er et est non comparantur verbalia activa in ing ; ut luving amans ; nee 

passiva ; ut luved amatus, taught doctus ; uti nee composita cum abl, ful, les, Ijk, 

* * ; neque etiam ilia quae per jv, (-ive,) ish, et multa qua? per Ij, (-ly,) aut us 

* * *. Hue etiam refer materialia, ut goldn aureus, stbni lapideus : item quae 
tempus significant et ordinem * * ; ut wintrj hibernus, second, third. Et quam- 
vis aliquando audias stonier, aut famuser, tamen pro libertate loquendi tolera- 
bilius erit sermo, potius quam laudabilis scriptura. Per signa tamen omnia ferd 
quae diximus comparantur ; ut m'or luving, most hiving, &c. 

Alex. Gil, Logon. Ang. 1621, p. 35. 

It will be observed that with Gil the mode of comparison depended on the 
ending, not the length of the adjective. 

20. P. 139. Insignificance of Celtic element. 

Comparative philologists draw inferences from the coincidence of parts of 
the Gothic and the Celtic vocabularies, which seem to me by no means warranted. 
Nobody doubts that both these classes of speech belong to the Indo-European 
family, and therefore very many words must be common to them all; but the 
supposition, that in such cases the Goth borrowed from the Celt, is in most 
instances contrary to historical probability, and the converse is, most likely, 
quite as often the fact. In the etymological research of the present day, the 
historical method of investigation is unhappily much neglected, and ethnologists 
are constructing historical systems on the foundation of linguistic theory, instead 
of controlling and rectifying such theory by historical evidence. 

The comparative philology of the languages of Europe, in their actual de- 
velopment in the Middle Ages, will ultimately prove one of the most fertile 
sources of instruction upon the true theory and true history of human speech, 
and we shall find that many Gothic and many Romance words, which have hith- 
erto been referred to very distant sources, are really contributions which the 
one has borrowed from the other. 

Tacitus, De Mor. Gcr. c. 26, observes : " Auctumni perinde nomen ac bona 
ignorantur," they have no names for autumn or for its fruits ; and Ihre, and 
many other etymologists, suppose that the Dutch oogst, the German obst, 
the Danish and Swedish host, are from the Latin name of the harvest month 



692 APPENDIX. 

August. So the G. frucht is in all probability the Latin fructus, and the 
Anglo-Saxon m u n t can hardly be other than the Latin m o n s. 

21. P. 142. Etymology of the Portuguese feitiso. 

The Spanish etymological correlative of feitico is hechizo, A in mod. 
Sp. often corresponding to Port. /, ch to Port. t. Ihre points out the resem- 
blance of these words to the Swedish h e x a , a witch, and suggests that they 
may have been introduced into Spain by the Goths. 

22. p. 143. Etymology of coco. 

Oviedo (Ramusio, III. 64, A., Purchas, III. 982) says : u This first was called 
coco for this cause, that when it is taken from the place where it cleaveth fast 
to the tree, there are seene two holes, and above them two other naturall holes, 
which altogether do represent the gesture and figure of the cattes called mam- 
mons, that is monkeys, when they cry, which [the cry] the Indians call coca." 
But De Barros is a higher authority than Oviedo, and his derivation is the more 
probable. 

23. P. 143. Etymology of coir. 

The derivation given in the text is erroneous. C a i r is, no doubt, an In- 
dian word, and it is the native term for the fibre of the coco-nut husk. 

24. P. 154. Million, and other collective words denoting large numbers, 
wanting in Anglo-Saxon. 

In Aelfric's Homily on the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Thorpe's edition, 
i. 348, we find a singular mode of expressing great numbers, by the multiplica- 
tion of (jusend, the highest collective numeral in the vocabulary : "Ten 
cJusend s i 3 a n hundfealde Susenda him mid wunodon:" ten 
thousand times hundredfold thousands dwelt with him. 

25. P. 155. Anglo-Saxon words in English. 

The reader will find the general relations of the Anglo-Saxon to the vocabu- 
lary of modern English ably discussed in an article in the Edinburgh Review 
for 1839. 

26. P. 155, note. Furthest for first. 
Gower uses this form : 

And when he weneth have an ende, 
Than is he furthest to beginne. 

Conf. Am., Pauli, II. 2. 

27. P. 158. Adverbs in -ly. 

In a dialogue on Free-Masonry, ascribed to Henry VI., and printed in the 
Lives of Leland, Hearne, and Wood, Oxford, 1772, vol. I. 97, headly is used for 



APPENDIX. 693 

Quest. What mote ytt [Free-masonry] be ? 

Ans. Ytt beeth the Skylle of Nature, the understondynge of the m) T ghte 
that ys herynne, and its sondrye worckynges ; sonderlyche, the Skylle of Rec- 
tenynges, of Waightes, and Metynges, and the treu manere of Faconnynge al 
thynges for Mannes use, headlye, Dwellynges, and Buyldynges of alle Kindes," 
&c. &c. 

28. P. 180. Words and phrases, now vulgar, often in good use in old 
writers. 

Party, for person, now an offensive vulgarism, occurs in the Memorials of 
the Empire of Japan, published by the Hakluyt Society, p. 55, and very fre- 
quently in Holland, and other authors of his time. " Apelles, not knowing the 
name of the partie who had brought him thither, 1 ' &c. &c. * * " but the king 
presently tooke knowledge thereby of the partie that had played this pranke by 
him," &c. &c. Holland's Pliny, II. 539, E, 

29. P. 181. Supposed Americanisms often old English. 

Dampier, 1703, I. 292, has " clear round," and II. 5, fix, apparently in the 
New England sense. " We went ashore and dried our cloaths, cleaned our 
guns, dried our ammunition, and fixt ourselves against our enemies if we should 
be attacked." 

To feel of, occurs in Knox's Ceilon, 1681. "They usually gather them 
before they be full ripe, boreing an hole in them, and feeling of the kernel, they 
know if they be ripe enough for their purpose." P. 14. 

Tonguey {tungy), formerly common, and still sometimes used, in New England, 
in the sense of fluent in speech, eloquent, occurs in the older text of the 
Wycliffite version of Ecclus. viii. 4, ix. 25. The later text has janglere instead. 

30. P. 181. Number of words in English. 

In this estimate — one hundred thousand — I include technical terms only so 
far as they have become a part of the general vocabulary of all cultivated per- 
sons. If we add all the special terms of every science and every art, the num- 
ber of English words would be far beyond one hundred thousand. 

31. P. 184. Penny. 

Weidenfeld, Secrets of the Adepts, uses penny for duodecimal part : " Of 
the white likewise, one was to be of ten-penny, another of eleven, another of 
sterling silver," &c. &c. Address to Students, (15.) Here ten-penny silver is 
silver ten-twelfths fine. 

32. Pp. 184, 185. Deficiencies of Dictionaries. 

To express the relation between an object and the material of which it is 
made, the French use the prepositions d e and en; as, un pont de pierre, 



694 APPENDIX. 

un palais en marbre, une statue en bronze. Doubtless, the pre- 
position d e is the more proper of the two ; but, nevertheless, e n is very fre- 
quently employed instead, both colloquially, and by many of the best writers in 
the language. But neither in the French-English Dictionary of Fleming and 
Tibbins, nor in the much more complete Dictionnaire National of Bescherelle, is 
this use of the preposition e n noticed. 

33. P. 185, note. Origin of phrase, pair of stairs. 

In the Supplement to the last edition of Webster, it is suggested that this 
expression originated in the use of pair to designate, not a couple, but " any 
number of pares, or equal things that go together ;" as " a pair (set) of chess- 
men, a pair (pack) of cards." This is a plausible, and perhaps the true expla- 
nation; but nevertheless, as stairs did not mean steps, hut flights of steps, I think 
the theory I have proposed upon the whole more probable. The Gloss, of Arch., 
I. 242, gives this quotation from William of Worcester : * "a hygh grese called 
a steyr of xxxii. steppys," which corresponds to Milton's use of the words. 

34. P. 204. Use of the pronoun in composition to mark sex ; as, he-goat. 
In Greek and Latin lexicons and grammars, the article 6, rj, t6, and the 

demonstrative, hie, hasc, hoc, are sometimes employed to indicate the 
gender of nouns, as occupying less space than the usual abbreviations, masc, 
fern., and neut. Gil, Logon. Ang. p. 3, writing in Latin, uses hie according 
to the English idiom : " Bucke, hie dama." 

Not less awkward than these compounds is the employment of the personal 
pronoun for male and female, as in Dampier, 1703, L, 106 : * * " both Hes 
and She's [the turtles] come ashoar in the day-time and lie in the sun." 
Grimm's Dictionary under Er, 11, gives very similar examples of the employ- 
ment of e r and s i e in German, and this is hardly worse than the common 
German use of the neuter diminutives, Mannchen and Weibchen, man- 
ling and xtifeiing, to designate, respectively, the male and the female of animals. 

35. P. 204, note. Compounds with un-. 

In the Wycliffite versions, Prol. to Romans, 299, we find: "The Jewis 
* * * bi breking of the lawe have vnwrshipid God ;" and Rom. i. 13, "I nyle 
you for to vnknowe." Lord Clarendon somewhere has, " untahen notice of." 

36. P. 212. Nyctalopia, equivocal. 

'NvKTaXooiria est passio qua per diem visus patentibus oculis denegatur, et 
nocturnis irruentibus tenebris redditur, aut versa vice (ut plerique volunt) die 
redditur, nocte negatur. Isidorus, Orig., IV. c. viii. 

37. P. 215, note. Technical terms in Dutch. 

Staring, Yoormals en Thans, 44, has "scheikundige ofwerktuigs- 



APPENDIX. 695 

k u n d i g e ," chemical or mechanical ; and on p. 78, "volkshuishoudkun- 
dig beschouwd," considered from-the-point-of -national-economy, volks- 
huishoudkundig being used adverbially. The former two of these com- 
pounds are absurd and unmeaning, because, as used in the passage where they 
occur, they refer to chemical or mechanical action, and therefore the element 
k u n d e is worse than superfluous. 

So on p. 82, he uses evennachtslijn for equator, and on p. 87, g e k o r- 
v e n e for insects. But terms so formed are by no means confined to Dutch 
writers on physical science, for the grammarians use zelfklinker and 
medeklinker for vowel and consonant, and gezichteinder, sight-ender y 
is employed for horizon by Van Lennep and other belles-lettres authors. 

8§. P. 226. Humility. 

I am perhaps mistaken in supposing that by "great apostle," Wesley meant 
the "apostle to the Gentiles." Taireivofypoavvri occurs in Acts xx. 19; Col. ii. 
18, 23 ; and 1 Pet. v. 5 ; and it is now impossible to say by whom the word was 
framed. See Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament, if. xliii. 

39. P. 231. Definition of hate. 

This is borrowed from Cicero. Odium ira inveterata. Tusc. Disp., IV. 9. 

40. P. 246. Etymology of cattle. 

The derivation from caput, (capitale,) a head, as we say, " so many 
head of sheep, or oxen," though supported by high authorities, is improbable ; 
because, among other reasons, the words, chatel, cat alia, (pi.) &c, were 
applied to what lawyers call chattels real, that is, certain rights in real estate 
distinct from the fee, or absolute title, and to personal property in general, long 
before cattle, or any other derivative from the same root, was used specially as a 
designation of domestic quadrupeds. This view of the subject is confirmed by 
the fact of the non-existence of a cognate word with the meaning of cattle in 
the Italian and Spanish languages, which could hardly have failed to possess it, 
had it been really of Latin etymology. 

Chatel has an apparent relationship both to the French acheter, to 
purchase, and to the Saxon ceapian, Icelandic kaupa, German kaufen, 
of the same signification. 

Celtic etymologists derive acheter from the Celtic achap, a word of 
the same radical meaning ; but as the Goths, in early ages, were a much more 
commercial and maritime people than the Celts, it is more probable tlrat the 
root is Gothic than Celtic. 

Capitale, chatel, acheter, chattels and cattle, are, therefore, in all 
probability, cognate with the Saxon ceapian, and not with caput. Schmid, 



696 APPENDIX. 

Gesetze der Angel-Sachsen, 2d edition, 1858, glossary, under captale, ap- 
pears to adopt this etymology. 

See Wedgwood, Etym. Diet, Art. Chattels. 

41. P. 253. Species in the sense of visible form. 

* * havynge sothli the spice [or licnesse] of pite, forsothe denyinge the 
rertu of it. Wycl., 2 Tim. iii. 5. 

42. P. 273. Words suddenly made prominent. 

The progress of natural science, and the discussion of the theories of vital 
propagation and growth, have made develop and development, and the ideas they 
express, so familiar that it is hard to find a page of contemporaneous literature 
■without them ; and their great currency is one of the many proofs of the extent 
to which conceptions derived from physical science have entered into the gene- 
ral culture of our times. In a recent report of a committee upon the vegetables 
exhibited at the fair of an agricultural society, I observe the award of a pre- 
mium to the grower of some " remarkably well developed squashes." 

43. P. 277. The Icelandic participle buinn. 

Buinn is also used as a sort of past auxiliary, much in the sense of the 
German adjective fertig; as, ek er buinn at skrifa, I have done 
writing, I have just written. 

44. P. 305, note. Change of grammatical class of words. 
Gower made a noun of the verb will. 

But yet is nought my fest all plain, 
But all of woldes and of wisshes, &c. 

Conf. Am., Pauli, III. 32. 

Several examples of the use of to out as a verb will be found in Richardson. 
There is some confusion between this verb and the legal term to oust, which has 
been supposed to be from the French oter (oster), and oust may be but a 
Gallicized orthography of out. 

45. P. 305. Dialect of children idiomatic. 

In old English and Scottish popular poetry, ballads especially, my lane, or, 
lone, her lone, are often used for I alone, she alone, &c. I lately heard a child 
of three years old say, on several different occasions : " Put me into the swing: 
I can't get up my lone? 

Alone, as well as the corresponding word in all the Gothic languages, is a 
compound of all and one, and it is altogether recent in origin, for it does not 
exist in Anglo-Saxon, Old-Northern, Moeso-Gothic, Old-High-German, or even 
Middle-High-German, though it is found in the modern representatives of all 



APPENDIX. 697 

these dialects. Robert of Gloucester has al one, as, " Tho Vortiger was al one," 
and Robert de Brunne, alone, at least according to the printed copies ; but, in 
general, the words were written separately, and syntactically connected with the 
objective of a personal or sometimes a possessive pronoun, until near the close 
of the fourteenth century. Thus, Gower : 

But, for he may nought all him one 
In sundry places do j ustice, &c. 

PaulVsed.,111.118. 

The king, which made mochel mone, 

Tho stood as who saith all him one 

Withoute wife, &c. Ibid., III. 285. 

The forms, my lone, her lone, &c, originated, no doubt, in a hasty pronun- 
ciation of me all one, her all one, and became established by the ignorance of the 
ballad-mongers. 

In the Harrowing of Hell, a religious poem written not far from the year 
1300, published by Halliwell, Dominus says to Sathan : 

Ant thou shalt wyte wel to day 
That mine wolle y have away. 
Wen thou bilevest al thyn one, 
Thenne myht thou grede and grone. 

Halliwell renders the verse, " Wen thou bilevest al thyn one," " When thou 
hast none but thine own left." This Garnett contemptuously cites as an instance 
of the way in which Halliwell " can pervert the sense of the very plainest pas- 
sages," and he explains the verse by ascribing to bilevest the sense of losest, 
renouncest, so that the meaning would be, " When thou losest all thine own," 
that is, all the souls of the patriarchs and prophets in the limbus patrum, who 
were released by Christ on his ascension, and whom Satan had claimed as 
his own. 

But Garnett's error is as gross as Halliwell's. Christ could not be supposed 
to admit that these souls were Satan's own, and the true meaning of the passage 
is, when thou remainest alone, the limbus being left vacant by the rescue of the 
souls whom Christ carried up to Paradise. 

It is true that not much importance can be attached to the orthography of 
one, but I know no instance in which own is spelled one ; and the sense of 
remain continued to be sometimes ascribed to bileve as late as the time of Chau- 
cer. See Cant. T., 10897. 

46. P. 30*7. Termination, -ster, as sign of gender. 



698 APPENDIX. 

The conclusion, that the ending, -ster, was never used as a sign of sex, or 
gender in English, is too strongly stated in the text. 

Among the various readings in the Wycliffite versions, I find several instances 
of feminine nouns in -ster, which, being printed at the foot of the page, had 
escaped my observation. They are, daunstere, Ecclus. ix. 4 ; dwelstere, Jer. xxi. 
13; weilstere, Jer. ix. 17 ; sleestere, Tobit iii. 9; syngstere, II. Paral. xxxv. 25, 
and I. Esdras ii. 65, and, in one instance, in the text of Purvey's version, II. 
Kings xix. 35. With this last exception, the texts employ, daunseresse, dwel- 
leresse, weileresse, sleeresse, and syngeresse, or woman-synger. Other remarkable 
feminines in these versions are, disciplisse, devouresse, servauntesse, and thrallesse. 

P. Ploughman, Vision, 3087, has " Beton the brewestere" where the context 
shows it to be feminine, and v. 8683, " As a shepsteres shere," feminine also, 
shepstere not meaning a sheep-shearer, as Wright supposes, but a seamstress, as 
appears from Palsgrave, v. schepstarre, and Nares, v. shepster. JShepster is 
shapester, one who shapes, forms, or cuts out, linen garments. 

Tombestere, a female dancer, occurs more than once in Chaucer, and 
fruitestere, Cant. Tales, 12412, is apparently feminine. Minshew makes seam- 
ster feminine, and Ben Jonson, in the Sad Shepherd, II. 3, employs seitPster as 
a feminine, but in a rustic dialect. On the other hand, we find in P. Plough- 
man, Vision, 4793, canonistres masculine. There is, then, no doubt that this 
termination was sometimes regarded as a feminine, but such does not appear 
ever to have been the general English usage. 

47. P. 316. Verbs from adjectives. 

Gower uses more and less as transitive verbs. 

What he woll make lasse, he lasseth, 
What he woll make more, he moreth. 

PauWs ed., III. 147. 
So that it mighte nought be mored. Ibid., 254. * 

The verbs to less and to honest are both found in the older Wycliffite version, ' 
the former in Ecclus. xviii. 5, xix. 6, 7, where the later text has make lesse and 
made lesse ; the latter in Ecclus. xi. 23. 

4§. P. 322, note. Extract from Proclamation of Henry III. 

In this document, as printed after Pauli in Haupt's Zeitschrift, XI. 2, p. 298, 
the last clause quoted in this note reads : " rigt for to done and to foangen." 

49. P. 332. Confusion of lie and lay. 

The old poem of Kyng Alisaunder has lie for lay : 

So on the schyngil lyth the haile, 

Every knyght so laide on other. 2210-2211. 



APPENDIX. 699 

50. P. 336. Inflections formed from compound tenses in the Romance lan- 
guages. 

In the Chronicle of Don Pero Nino, p. 56, we find the complicated combina- 
tion, facernos la han dejar, " they will make us abandon it." 

The compound tenses were sometimes used in Italian down to the end of the 
fifteenth century. Savonarola generally employs the inflected future, but in a 
sermon delivered " adi VIII. di giugno m.cccc.lxxxxv." p. 12, he has: " e dicoti 
che se idio ha premiare huomini almondo ha premiare gli chris- 
tiani," etc. 

51. P. 343. Corps, for living body. 

Southey, who was very well read in early English literature, appears to have 
overlooked the fact that corps was, not unfrequently, used for body of a living 
person in the seventeenth century. In a note on p. 407 of the Chronicle of the 
Cid, upon the word " carrion," he says : " In the translation of Richeome's Pil- 
grim of Loretto by G. W., printed at Paris, 1630, a similar word is employed, 
but not designedly, . . . the translator living in a foreign country, and speaking 
a foreign language, had forgotten the nicer distinctions of his own." "Women 
and maids," he says, " shall particularly examine themselves about the vanity of 
their apparell, * * * of their too much care of their corps," &c. 

Spenser uses this word for living body : 

A comely corpse with beautie faire endowed. 

Hymne in Honour of Beautie, 135. 

Fuller, in Andronicus, or, the Unfortunate Politician, iii. 18, uses corps, a 
dead body, as a plural : " As for the corps of Alexius * * * they were most 
unworthily handled," &c. And again, in his Church History of England, Book 

X. sec. i. § 12, speaking of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth, he says, " Her corps 
were solemnly interred under a. fair tomb," &c. But at the conclusion of Book 

XI. §§ 42, 45, 48, 49, and 50, he employs corpse in the singular, according to the 
present orthography and syntax. Are we to charge the printers with the error, 
or to credit them with the correction ? 

52. P. 346. Latinization of modern names. 

The Fardle of Facions gives us the converse of this practice, and calls the 
historian Tacitus, Cornelius the still. " For Cornelius the stylle, in his firste 
book of his yerely exploictes, called in Latin e Annales," &c. &c, chap. iiii. S. iii. 
edition of 1555; reprint of 1812, p. 312. 

53. P. 384. Plural of Norman-French nouns. 

The statement in the text is too loose. Norman masculine nouns regularly 



700 APPENDIX. 

made the nominative singular ; the accusative and the vocative plural, in s, but 
the nominative plural was without that termination. But there were many ex- 
ceptions, and in these instances the nominative plural was also in s, as were also 
the plural of all feminines derived from Latin nouns of the first declension, and 
many derived from other declensions. The consequence was that the plurals in 
s were very much more numerous than those without it, and a foreigner would 
naturally have taken s as the general plural sign. 

54. P. 388. Coalescence of auxiliary and past participle. 

These forms occur even in the Life of Richard III., ascribed to More, as 
printed in Hardyng, p. 64*7, reprint of 1812. "Richard might (as the fame 
went) asaued hymself if he would ajled awaie." But this passage is not in 
Rastell's edition of 1557, and More could hardly have adopted this colloquialism. 

55. P. 396. The expression, " in our midst," &c. 

In the passages where the later translations use among us, you, them, whom, 
the Wycliffite versions almost uniformly employ, " in the myddil or myddis ;" 
and, of course, the exemplifications of this form are extremely numerous in 
those versions. In nine cases out of ten, certainly, the construction is, " in the 
myddil of us, you, them, or whom ;" but there are a few instances, as, for ex- 
ample, in Exodus xxxiv. 10, Numbers xiv. 13, where " from or in whos myddil or 
myddis" is used in both texts ; and in the older translation of Jerome's Prologue 
to Romans, we find, " for myche merciful is God, the whiche wolde bringe you 
to oure followinge." Our is sometimes used in the same way elsewhere in Old 
English, as in 1 Cor. i. 3, Wye. Vers., older text : " alle that inclepyn the name 
of oure Lord Jhesu Crist in ech place of hem and oure ;" later text, " ech place 
of hem and of oure ; where, in the older text, our is a genitive plural. So in 
the much earlier Legend of St. Brandan, Perc. Soc, p. 5, your is made a genitive 
plural ; " ac youre an schal atta ende," and one of you shall at the end, &c. 

With respect to these last examples, as I remarked on p. 395, the employ- 
ment of our and your in this construction was contrary to both principle and 
usage in the English of that period. The use of whose, or even of their, in 
such phrases, would not have been so objectionable, (though I have not found 
their so employed in Wycliffe,) because there was no possessive pronoun for 
the relative, as we have seen there was not for the personal of the third person 
in Anglo-Saxon. In that language, h w as s , the genitive or possessive case of 
the relative, or rather, interrogative, h w a , h w a? t , was used instead of a, 
possessive pronoun for all genders and numbers. Where, therefore, the Anglo- 
Saxon did not distinguish the possessive case and the possessive pronoun, it 
was not strange that early English should confound them. At present, how- 



APPENDIX. 701 

ever, the distinction is established, and it is a corruption of speech to disre- 
gard it. 

56. P. 399. Want of the neuter possessive its. 

In the Fardle of Facions, 1555, p. 321, reprint of 1812, we have: "a cer- 
taine sede which groweth there of the owne accorde ; " and in Holland's Pliny, 
I. 24, "hauingfire of the owne before." These forms are by no means un- 
common. 

57. P. 403. Anomalous combinations in syntax. 

Kuskin's boldness as a writer is by no means confined to the expression of 
critical opinion, and he does not hesitate to employ familiar combinations from 
which more timid authors might shrink. Thus, vol. i., third ed., p. 63 : " Now 
the whole determination of this question depends upon whether the unusual fact 
be," &c. Ibid., p. 121, " but it depends upon whether the energy of the mind 
which receives the instruction be sufficient," &c. Ibid., 390, " a confusion which 
you might as well hope to draw sea-sand particle by particle, as to imitate leaf 
for leaf." 

5§. P. 403, note. Possessive pronoun as possessive sign. 

Besides the example quoted from Robert of Gloucester, in the note, I find in 
that writer two other instances of the separation of the syllable ys from the 
root in the possessive case : 

The kyng tok Brut ys owne body, in ostage as it were, 

p. 13. 
And after Brut ys owne nome he clepede it Bretagne, p. 22. 
In Gower, Conf. Am., Pauli, iii. 356, is a passage where his may be a posses- 
sive sign : 

To holde love his covenaunt ; 

but it is possible that love may here be used as a dative, to hold to love his 
covenant, his requirement or stipulation. 

There are many similar cases in the continuation of Robert of Gloucester 
printed in the appendix to Hearne's edition, and written apparently about the 
middle of the fifteenth century. Thus: "Sir John is tytne," p. 589, "In the 
V. Kyng Henry is tyme," p. 593, " through God is grace," p. 595 ; and the use of 
the pronoun his as a possessive sign is frequent in Hardyng, who is supposed 
to have finished his chronicle about 1465, though he most usually employs the 
regular possessive in s. Thus, reprint of 1812, p. 156 : " In the year of Christ his 
incarnacion." P. 226 : " and putte hym whole in God his high mercye." And 
in the continuation of 1543, p. 436, " Kynge Henry the VI. hys wife." 

59. P. 413. Style of Thucydides, and other ancient writers. 



702 



APPENDIX. 



It is often impossible to resolve the language of Thucydides and of other early 
writers into what are technically called periods, and we frequently observe the 
absence of a periodic structure in the conversation, not merely of unschooled 
persons, but of all who habitually speak in an inartificial style. I may illustrate 
the manner of Thucydides, certainly not with a view of ridiculing the diction 
of that immortal author, but in a way intelligible to persons not familiar with 
Greek, by an extract from a pugilistic challenge of about the year 1700, which I 
find in the New York Tribune, in a letter from a correspondent at Buffalo, dated 
October 16th, 1858. It is said to have been taken from a paper in possession of 
Mr. Placide, and if not genuine, it is at least ben trovato. 

" I, Felix Maguire, first master of the fist in the Kingdom of Ireland, tutor 
to the noted Mr. Holmes, who has fought the celebrated Mr. Figg this season 
with general applause, the last of which battles I was engaged with him myself, 
whereas I hit the said Mr. Figg on the belly and gave him other convincing 
proof of my judgment therein, on Wednesday, the 11th instant, when, contrary 
to all expectation, Mrs. Stokes, styled the invincible, matchless, unconquerable 
city championcss, took on her to condemn the method of Mr. Holmes' displaying 
his skill before a grand appearance assembled, which, with regret, I was obliged 
to hear, and in regard, though said gentleman was my pupil, I so far resent it 
that I hereby invite Mr. James Stokes, together with the said Elizabeth, his 
wife, at their own seat of valor, and at the time appointed, to face and fight me 
and a woman I have trained up to the science from her infancy, one of my own 
country, and who I doubt not will as far exceed Mrs. Stokes as she is said to 
have done those she has hitherto been concerned with." 

60. P. 417. Rigidity of European characters. 

In the Malmantile Racquistato, Florence, 1688, and in the curious lying Life 
of the Jesuit Anchieta, Rome, 1738, the letters a, e, and n are elongated by a 
horizontal stroke at bottom, when necessary to fill a space. 

01. P, 423. Errors in writing from dictation. 

The reader will find in Goethe's Nachgelassene Werke, B. v. S. 106, an 
amusing and instructive article on this subject, entitled Heir-, Schreib- und 
Druckfehler. 

62. P. 424. But after my making thou write more trew. 

Trench, Select Glossary, under Make, Maker, states that these words, "as 
applied to the exercise of the poet's art," and " as equivalent to poet," are not 
found in any book anterior to the revival of the study of the Greek literature 
and language in England." It will hardly be said that the study of Greek was 
revived in England before the Reformation, or, in any event, in the fourteenth 



APPENDIX. 703 

century. In the lines quoted from Chaucer, in the text, I think making must be 
used in this sense, as also by the same poet in several other passages ; as, for 
example, in these verses from the conclusion of the complaint of Mars and 
Venus, which have been quoted for another purpose, on p. 501 : 

And eke to me it is a great penaunce, 

Sith rime in English hath soch scarcite, 

To folow, word by word, the curiosite 

Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce. 

There are several similar instances in the Legend of Good Women. Thus : 

Alas, that I ne had English rime, or prose 
Suffisaunt, this floure to praise aright, 
But helpeth, ye that han conning and might, 
Ye lovers, that can make of sentement ! 

The lines that follow these are entirely decisive as to the meaning of make in 
this passage, if indeed those just quoted leave any room for doubt. 

Again : 

The man hath served you of his conninges, 
And forthred well your law in his makinges, 
All be it that he can not well endite. 

So also, 

He shal never more agilten in this wise, 
But shal maken as ye woll devise, 
Of women trewe in loving al hir life. 

And, 

But now I charge thee, upon thy life, 
That in thy legende thou make of this wife, 
Whan thou hast other smale ymade before. 

In Robert de Brunne's Prologue to his Chronicle, Hearne's ed., p. xcix., I 

find, 

I mad noght for no disours, 

Ne for no seggers, no harpours, &c. ; 



and on p. c, 



also on p. ci., 



bat may bou here in Sir Tristrem, 
Ouer gestes it has be steem, 
Ouer all bat is or was, 
If men it sayd as made Thomas, &c. ; 

For pis makyng I wille no mede, 
Bot gude prayere, when ye it rede. 



704 APPENDIX. 

In Piers Ploughman, Vision, verse 7470, we have : 

And thow medlest with makynges, 
And myghtest go saye thi Sauter; 
and in verse 7483, 

To solacen hym some tyme, 
As I do whan I make. 

Make occurs, in the same sense, in the Confessio Amantis of Gower, Pauli's 
edition, voL iii. 384 — 

My muse doth me for to wite 
And saith, it shall be for my beste, 
Fro this day forth to take reste, 
That I no more of love make, &c. 

See also notes to vol. i. of Dyce's edition of Skelton, p. 186, and passages 
there cited. 

63. P. 433. Tale of Melibceus, and Persones Tale. 

The text is here in error. The former of these is a translation from the 
French, in which language it is still extant, and the latter is probably also a 
version of some Latin or French treatise now lost. 

64. P. 456. Confusion of syllables in spoken English. 

There were current in English, as late as the seventeenth century, many synco- 
pated phrases, which have almost wholly disappeared since reading and writing 
became general. Two of these are mentioned in the French grammar prefixed 
to Cotgrave's French-English Dictionary, 1650, Section of Consonants, muskiditti, 
much good may it doe to you, and Godigodin, God give you good evening. So, 
Godge, for God give you (or ye), dich, for do it you (or ye) ; both which, when 
the origin was forgotten, were followed by another pronoun, or other objective, 
as Godge you good morrow. Much good dich thy good heart. 

Even in Italy, clear as is the usual articulation, we hear such expressions as 
ciao, for the complimentary phrase, schiavo suo. 

65. P. 469. Phrase God Hid you, or, Goddildyou. 

Although English articulation has long tended to insert the y consonant 
where it does not belong, rather than to suppress it where it does, yet the ex- 
amples collected in Nares under God ild, as well as the concurrent use of God 
yield in similar combinations, show almost conclusively that the latter is the 
original, the former a corrupted form. The etymology, God shield, is quite im- 
probable. Halliwell, Glossary, gives dilde, to protect, as Anglo-Norman, but he 



APPENDIX. 705 

cites no authority, and I find no evidence of the existence of such an Anglo- 
Norman word. 

66, P. 478, note. Old pronunciation of diphthongs ea and ei. 

In the rules for the pronunciation of English at the end of Sherwood's 
English and French Dictionary, London, 1650, the sound of e Freach is ascribed 
to these diphthongs. 

Ea, & ei. Les dipthongues ea & ei se prononcent e, comme teach, deceive. 

Ee. Ee, dipthongue, on prononce i, comme need, seed, breed, speed, creed. 

Hence it is evident that the vowel sound in teach, receive, was not that of ee 
in need, but was the continental e. 

6?. P. 489. Confusion of c and t. 

The interchange of these mutes explains the double form tind, whence 
tinder,) and kindle. 

68. P. 495. L often silent in words of French extraction. 

Suckling, in the middle of the seventeenth century, as appears by a passage 
quoted by Alibone, under Carew, pronounced fault with a silent I, for he 
rhymes it with laureate. 

Tom Carew was next, but he had a. fault 
That would not well stand with a laureat. 

69. P. 495, note. Scroll derived from scrow, Icel. s k r a . 
In Richard Coer de Lion, Weber, ii. 133, we find: 

Looke every mannys name thou wryte 
Upon a scrowe of parcheymn, &c. 

And in Capgrave, p. 260: "In this tyme the Lolardis set up scrowis at West- 
minster and at Poules, with abhominable accusaciones of hem that long to the 
cherch," &c. 

■y©. P. 50*7. Consonances in ancient literature. 

Mullach, Grammatik der Griechischen Vulgarsprache, 78, cites a passage of 
rhymed prose from Plato, Symp., p. 197, D., irpionqra (x\v iroplfav, aypi6Tnra 
& Qopifav, etc., through several pairs of consonances, and two couplets of 
rhymed verse from a speech of Strepsiades in the Clouds of Aristophanes, 7 07. 
Cicero, Tusc. Disp., I. 28, and III. 19, quotes rhyming verses from Ennius, but 
the rule of Quintilian, whom Roger Ascham triumphantly appeals to in the 
Scholemaster, is express in its condemnation of like endings, similiter 
desinentia. See Quint., IX. c. 4. 
45 



706 APPENDIX. 

In the literature of the Middle Ages, we sometimes meet with rhymes in 
prose, in works where we should least expect to find them. Thus, in the Saxon 
Chronicle, MLXXXVII., p. 296, Ingram's edition, there is a long passage with 
a great number of rhyming words at irregular intervals. 

The Old French Books of the Kings are full of passages where the frequent 
rhymes must have been intentional. Thus, p. 5 : " Del present out primes Deus 
sa part, puis al evesche fist bel reguard. Et si li dist : Sire, sire, entend a mei ; 
jo sui la tue ancele ki ja devant tei preieres^s, E pur cest enfant dune Deu 
requis ; il me le dunad a sun plaisir, et je li rend pur lui servir." P. 7, Par pri, 
par force, les dames violerent ; le pople del sacrifice tresturnerent. Del sacrifise 
pristrent a sei, par rustie et par desrei, plus que n'en out cumanded la lei." P. 
8, " Vostre fame n'est mie seine, kar a, mal le pople meine ; ne faites mais tel 
uverainne, dunt le sacrifise remaigne. Si horn peche vers altre, a Deu se purrad 
acorder, e s' il peche vers Deu ki purrad pur lui preier? tant tendrement les fola 
ama que reddement ne's chastia; par bel les reprist e par amur, nient par 
destrece ne par reddur, cume apent a maistre e hpastur" 

71* P. 550. Alliteration in ancient writers. 

In the phrase quoted from Cicero on p. 550, it is highly probable, as a friend 
suggests to me, that sine sensu is a gloss which has found its way into the 
text. In the Tusc. Disp. Cicero quotes some remarkable instances of alliterative 
verse from early Koman poets. Thus, from Ennius : 

Qui alteri exitium joarat 
Eum scire oportet sibi paratam pestem ut particijoet. 

Tusc. Disp., II. IT. 
From Accius : 

J/ajor mihi moles, majus miscendumst malum 
Qui illius acerbum cor contundam et comprimam. 

Impius hortatur me frater, ut meos malis miser 

Jl/andarem natos. Tusc. Disp., IV. 36. 

72. P. 550. Alliteration in the Gothic languages. 

Alliteration was a regular characteristic of Icelandic verse, and it often ap- 
pears to have been designedly introduced into prose. There is a long passage 
in alliterative prose in the Saga Olafs konungs hins helga, K. 60, and a still 
longer near the close of App. EE, to that Saga in Forn. Sog. V. The following 
is an extract from the former. * * * " kalladu hann Zinan ok fttillatan, Asegan 
ok Auggodan, mildan ok mj iiklyndan, witran ok wingoSan, fryggvan ok frulyndan 
/orsjalan ok /astorcJan, #joflan ok #66"gjarnan, /rsegan ok /alyndan, #6<5an ok 



APPENDIX. 707 

^laepavaran, s£j6rnsaman °k saltan vel, ^eyminn at ^ru3s logum ok ^o5ra 
manna, etc. 

73. P. 553. Alliterative quotations. 

Byron's objections to the octosyllabic verse have no better foundation than 
the alliteration in the phrase, " fatal facility," and many a shallow critic has con- 
demned fine poetry in this beautiful metre, upon the strength of that unlucky 
expression. 

74. P. 558. Half-rhyme in Pulci. 

There is a very similar instance in the hundredth and hundred and first stan- 
zas of the sixth canto of the Malmantile Racquistato. The editor, Puccio 
Lamoni, (Paulo Minucci,) remarks on the word bisticcio in st. 101 : " E la 
figura che i Greci dicono Parechesi, ed e quando si dicono due parole che hanno 
lo stesso, o poco differente suono, e di verso significato," and he refers to a 
canzone of Guittone d'Arezzo, made up of " queste allusioni di parole," the con- 
clusion of which is as follows : 

Movi canzone adessa, 
E vanne a Rezzo ad essa, 
Da cui eo tegno ed o 
Se n' alcun ben mi do, 
E di, che presto so, 
Se vuol, di tornar so. 

Other examples are stated to occur in Bindo Bonichi, and Francesco da 
Barberino. 

75. P. 578. Vagueness of terms of abuse. 

II m'appelle jacobin, revolutionnaire, plagiaire, voleur, empoisonneur, faus- 
saire, pestifere ou pestifere, enrage, imposteur, calomniateur, libelliste, homme 
horrible, ordurier, grimacier, chiffbnnier, * * * Je vois ce qu'il veut dire ; il 
entend que lui et moi sommes d'avis different. Paul Louis Courier. Seconde 
Lettre Particuliere. 

76. P. 580, note. Special meaning of soon. 

In the Romaunt of the Rose, v. 21-24, we find this passage : 

"Within my twentie yeare of age, 
When that love taketh his corage 
Of younge folke, I wente soone 
To bed, as I was wont to doone. 

Here soon evidently means early. 



708 



APPENDIX. 



The following examples have been furnished me by a friend ; 
We'll have a posset for't soon at night. 

Merry Wives of Windsor, I. 4. 
Come to me soon at night. Ibid., II. 2. 

Soon, at Jive o'clock 
Please you, I will meet you upon the mart. 

Comedy of Errors, I. 2. 

And soon at supper time I'll visit you. 

Ibid., III. 2. 

But as you make your soon-at-night , s relation, &c. 

B. Jonson, David is an Ass, I. 1. 

In all these cases, soon has the same meaning as in that cited from Chaucer. 

■J"?. P. 584, note. Affirmative particle. 

A curious form of yes occurs in Wycliffe, X. T., 2 Cor. i. 18 : "Ther is not in 
it is and nay, but in it is w," [Gloss, that is, treuthe,~\ and verse 19 : u Ther waa 
not in him is and nay, but in hym is- was," [Gloss, that is, stedefast treuthe.~\ In 
the later text, these passages read : " is and is not is not ther ynne, but is is in 
it ;" and, " ther was not in hym is and is not, but is was in hym." So in James, 
v. 12 : " Forsothe be your word, Is, is, Nay, nay," &c. The Wycliffite trans- 
lators, or at least Purvey, seem to have supposed that the affirmative particle 
was a form of the substantive verb. 

78. P. 587. The conjunction or, equivocal. 

In modern English, either, used as a conjunction, is always a disjunctive, and 
is only grammatically distinguished from one of the senses of or ; but in some 
early English writers, as, for example, in the Wycliffite school of translators, 
there are traces of a logical distinction between these particles. Either was very 
commonly employed to indicate difference, alternation, opposition, and or to 
mark identity of meaning. Thus, in both texts, Col. i. 20, " tho thingis that 
ben in erthis, ether that ben in heuenes." In the numerous glosses of the older, 
or Wycliffe's version of the New Testament, or is employed as the sign of 
identity, or of likeness, as in v. 21 of the chapter just cited, " aliened, or maad 
straunge ;" in v. 25, " mynistre, or seruaunt ;" in v. 26, " the mysterie, or 
priuete." This distinction is not uniformly observed by Wycliffe, but still so 
generally as to show that he recognized it. 

79. P. 637. Influence of words. 

" Words are great powers in this world ; not only telling what things are, 
but making them what else they would not be." 

Martineau's Sermon, The Sphere of Man's Silence. 



APPENDIX 



709 



§0. P. 651, note. Participial noun used passively. 

Other examples of the use of the participial noun in a passive sense, are : 
" We have a wyndowe in werchynge" Piers Ploughman, Vision, 1451 ; u Ther 
the man lith an helyng," Ibid., 11599 ; " Whils Veni Creator Spiritus is a sing- 
ing," Rutland Papers, 13 ; "In great aduenture of takynge with the Sarazins," 
Froissart, I. 657 ; " In dout of betrayinge," Ibid., 734 ; " Whyle every thyng was 
a preparynge" Ibid., II. 746 ; " Whyle these wordes were in speakynge," Sir T. 
More, Life of Edw. V., reprint of Hardyng, 507 ; " I went to their places where 
they make their anchors, and saw some making; also I saw great peeces of 
ordinance making," Coryat's Crudities, reprint, I. 282 ;' " While these prelimi- 
nary steps were taking" Robertson, Charles V., B. XII. ; " The illustrations 
preparing for the third volume," Ruskin, Mod. P., vol. II., Advertisement ; u The 
extent of ravage continually committing" Ibid., p. 5, note ; but, " it is being 
swept away," Ibid., same page, text; "the palaces are being restored," " the mar- 
bles are being scraped," Ibid., p. 7, note. 

81. P. 655. Active forms in passive sense in French and German. 

Other examples of the use of active forms with a passive sense, in French 
and German, are the Fr. v o y a n t , as applied to colors, in the signification of 
showy, conspicuous, " le texte n'est par encore fini d'imprimer," Lettre 
de Clavier a P. L. Courier, 3 Sept. 1809 ; Diese Stadt * * * * ist zu baueu 
angefangen. Berghaus, Was man von der Erde weiss, I. 876. 



INDEX 



A, pronunciation of, 475. 

Abandon and abate, obsolescent in 17th een- 
tury, 278. 

'able, termination, force of, 135. 

Abuse, terms of, vague in meaning, 578, 692. 

Accent and quantity, relation of, 516. 

Accent, strong in English, 528. 

Accents ancient, introduction of, 286. 

Accentual system, characteristic of lan- 
guages, 473. 

Accentuation as affected by inflection, 373 ; 
change of in English, 528. 

Accusative before infinitive, 349. 

Adjective, English and Latin, 311, 327 ; com- 
parison of, 136, 312, App. 17. 

Affectation, universality of, 291. 

Agglutination, what, 196. 

Alliteration in poetry, 545 ; significance of, 
551. 

American accent, 674; dialect, Lecture 
XXX. ; pronunciation, 670 ; student of 
Englisb, want of facilities of, 14. 

Americani, name for cottons in Levant, 146. 

Ancients studied aloud, 411. 

Angles in England, 45. 

A n gl i and A n g 1 i a, names given by Rom- 
ish missionaries, 46. 

Anglo-Saxon, first use of term, 46 ; Gospels, 
vocabulary of, 199 ; elements in English, 
163, 172 ; laneruaee, grammatical structure 
of, 48, 356, 377, 380, 381 ; importance of to 
English student, 86, 105 ; mixed in charac- 
ter, 42 ; embodies formative principle of 
English, 160, 172 ; influenced by Latin, 
131 ; relations of to Anglo-Norman, 132 ; to 
Icelandic, 94 ; to modern English, 123, 160, 
162, 172, 382 ; pronunciation of, obscure, 
471 ; Teutonic rather than Scandinavian, 
44 ; literature, Christian, 131, App. 16. 

Annomination, what, 566. 

Anomalous constructions in English, 403. 

Arabic in Spain and Sicily, 141, 142. 

Archaism in English, 176. 

Archery, vocabulary of, 267. 

Articulation of different languages, 283, 374, 
672. 

Ascham, Roger, on English, 445. 

Assonance in Spanish poetry, 508, 564. 



Augment, temporal, in Greek, 563. 
Authors overruled by printers, 418 
Authorship, rewards of, 440, 450. 
Auxiliaries generally invariable in Eaglish, 
322. 

B, pronunciation of, 489. 

Baaing, used by Sidney and Keats, 36. 

Bacon's Essays, vocabulary of, 265. 

Becker, grammatical nomenclature of, 192. 

Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon poem, 6, App. 16. 

Berners', Lord, translation of Froissart, 112, 
603. 

Betterment, 309. 

Bible English, see Tyndale, "Wycliffe, and 
generally Lecture XXVIII. ; why Caxton 
did not print, 452 ; of 1611, dialect of, 86, 
622, 634 ; orthography of, 430 ; revision not 
re-translation, 629; principles adopted by re- 
visers, 622, 624 ; vocabulary of, 86, 123, 263, 
630 ; compared with dialect of Shakespeare, 
&c, 628 j must have special dialect, 631; 
new revision of, impracticable at present, 
640 ; not needed, 639 ; inexpediency of, 636. 

Books, ancient, compared with modern, 407, 
463. 

Both, how used by Coleridge, 116. 

Bow-wow way, Johnson's, 36. 

Bread, figurative use of, 247. 

Bribe, no word for in French, 228 ; ancient 
and modern meanings of, 249. 

British people, relations of, to civilization 
and liberty, 24. 

Bronchitis, why common among clergymen 
292. 

Browne, Sir Thomas, works of, 115 ; his com- 
parison of Anglo-Saxon and English, 48. 

Browning, Mrs., diction of, 126, 538. 

B n i n n , Icelandic participial adjective, 277, 
App. 42, 

C, pronunciation of, 490. 
Campbell's " angels' visits," 552. 
Cant of parties and professions, 238. 
Carving, nomenclature of, 591. 

Castle of Indolence, diction and versification 

of, 177, 540. 
Catalan language, 99, 370. 



INDEX. 



Caxton printed few refigious books, 452. 

Celtic, whether affected by Latin. 138 ; insig- 
nificance of in English Etym. .'og> . 136. 

Chaucer, literary character o* 22, 27, 111, 
168 ; description of the " gentleman," 258 ; 
vocabulary of, 111, 124, 167 ; versification 
of, 2? , to his copyist, 424. 

Chemistry, nomenclature of, 213. 

Children, dialect of, 305, App. 44. 

Christianity taught to Gothic tribes in ver- 
nacular, 371 ; introduced foreign words 
into Anglo-Saxon, 132. 

Church, Papal, hostile to cultivation of mod- 
ern languages, 102, 452. 

Churcbyarde's phonology, 474. 

Cicero's supposed deference for Plato, 599. 

Cimbric dialect in Italy, 140. 

Classical languages and literature, value of, 
77, 95. 

Classification, principles of, 191; of lan- 
guages, 192. 

Cobbett's rules of composition, 447 ; vocabu- 
lary and style, 126, 437. 

Coccus and coccum, what, 67. 

Cockeram's Dictionary, 278. 

Coincidence, more frequent use of, 272. 

Coleridge, philological value of his works, 
116. 

Comeling, good English word, 275. 

Come-outer, introduction of, 275. 

Comfort, peculiarly English word, 613. 

Commence, syntax of, 183. 

Composition, rapid, 447. 

Composition of words, 195. 

Compounds, when better than arbitrary 
words, 211; resolution of, 392 ; clumsy in 
English, 204; Greek and in other lan- 
guages, 201 ; scientific, 186. 

Concurrent mental action of different indi- 
viduals, 449. 

Conjugate words, 593. 

Consonances in prose writers, 507. 

Consonants, coalescence of, 488 ; stability of, 
487 ; confusion of, 489. 

Continental languages and literature older 
than English, 100. 

Copies of books how multiplied in ancient 
times, 423. 

Copyists, licenses of, 421, 423. 

Copy-right, influence of, 450. 

Corn, use of in different countries, 246. 

Cornowaile, John, introduced study of Eng- 
lish in schools, 102. 

Corps and corpse, use and syntax of, App. 50 

Corruptions of language, Lecture XXIX. ; 
Latham's views on, 645. 

Courier, P. L., on knowledge of French in 
Prance, 99 ; vagueness of terms of abuse, 
App. 74 ; style of, 448. 

Crabbc's Synonyms, 594. 

D, pronunciation of, 491. 

Danish scholars, services of, to Anglo-Saxon 
literature, 6. 

Deaf mutes, memory of, 2 ; natural signs of, 
33. 

Definite form of nouns, traces of in English, 
388. 

Demosthenes on delivery, 600 ; his use of 
ejaculation, 290 ; style of, 80, 354 ; wrote out 
his speeches, 448 ; derivation ot words, 193. 

Dialects, ancient, classical and vulgar, 362 •, 
Greek, ancient and modern, 682 ; Italian, 
677 ; modern Romance, 369 ; local, incon- 
veniences of, 676 ; how extirpated, 679. 



Dictionaries, imperfections of, 56, 62, 181 

App. 31 ; especially modern, 460. 
Diphthongs, 487. 
Directly, vulgar use of, 645. 
Dramatists, minor, importance of, li4. 
Drawling in American pronunciation, 670. 
Dutch, scientific nomenclature, 215. 

E, pronunciation of, 477. 

Elephant called by Arabic name in Ice- 
landic, 145. 

Elizabeth, Queen, education of, 615. 

England, completely protestantized in 16t 
century, 617; why this name applied tc 
country, 41. 

English, appellation bestowed by foreign 
missionaries, 41 ; language, composite but 
radically Saxon, 86, 118 ; epochs in , 48 ; 
awkward forms in, 402 ; changes in, 49, 
166, 262 ; late formation of, 101 ; compara- 
tively difficult, 98 ; gains and losses of, 128, 
174, 200, 267, 274 ; relation of elements in, 
86, 203 ; etymological proportions of, 118, 
126 ; general sources of, Lectures VI. and 
VII. ; how far cosmopolite, 438 ; inflections 
of, 382, 385 ; new inflections of, 386 ; saved 
by loss of French provinces, 170 ; double 
vocabulary of, 160 ; future fortunes of, 25 ; 
colloquialisms in, 253; in America, Lec- 
ture XXX. ; literature, late origin of, 10*1 ; 
old, not specially difficult, 21, 109 ; author's 
value of, 17 ; modernization of, 20, 104 ; 
philology, revival of and causes, 6 ; scien- 
tific nomenclature, 213 ; words in other 
languages, 147. 

Engraving, minute, 462. 

Enlightenment, not yet received, 158, 275. 

Equivocal language, 216. 

Etymologists, extravagances of, 58. 

Etymological proportions of style of English 
authors, 124. 

Etymology, offices of, 56 ; mistaken, influence 
of, 63 ; no guide to meaning of scientific 
terms, 84 ; familiar, effect of, 81 ; compara- 
tive, uses of, 64. 

Etymology of abominable, 63 ; aneal, 231 ; 
argosy, 145 ; atonement, 230 ; bound, in navi- 
gation, etc., 277 ; carmine and crimson, 73 ; 
cash, 143 ; caste, 143 ; cattle and chattel, 246, 
App. 8 ; cochineal, 74 ; coco-nut, 143 ; coir, 
343; commodore, 143; copy, 421; demijohn, 
144 ; drake, 61 ; dungeon, 144 ; exorbitant, 
187 ; false. 231 ; fetish and feticism, 142 ; first, 
154 ; Jlesh, 247 ; gemini ! 295 ; gentleman, 
256 ; gospel, 30 ; grain, as a dye, 66 ; housel, 
261 ; the humanities, 55 ; hunt, 392 ; isle 
ai : d island, 129 ; issue, 63 ; law, 123 \lyden, 
ledev, App. 1 ; mastery, mister anamystcry, 
251 ; meat, 257 ; metier , 252 ; precipitate, 
65 ; right, 123 ; scroll, 4S5 ; sense and sen- 
tence, 601 ; soldier, 250 ; specie, sj/ecies and 
spice, 253 ; lenpenny 'nail, etc., 184 ; umpire., 
389 ; vermilion, 74 ; world, 59 ; year, 245 t 
yieis, or iwis, 333. 

Euphemism, 576. 

Euphuism, Avhat, 567. 

Expletives, what, 293. 

Extemporary composition, 446 ; translation 
615. 

F, pronunciation of, 492. 
Family relations, names of, 155. 
Fetch becoming obsolete, 588. 
Fire-arms, vocabulary of, 268. 
Flesh, etymology and use of, 248, 



INDEX. 



713 



Foreign philology not indispensable to study 
of English, 76"; new in modern poetry, 525. 

Formulas, religious, 619, 637. 

FrankJin ignorant of foreign philology, 83 ; 
style of, how formed, 614. 

French, better spoken than English, 99 ; ele- 
ment in English, 435 ; important to student 
of English, 94 ; poor in inflections, 13 ; 
Norman influence of, 384. 

Friends, " plain language" of, 392. 

Frisic dialects, 43, 378. 

Froissart's Chronicle, 434. 

Fuller, Thomas, euphuism of, 568 ; on words, 
58 ; licenses in word-making, 203 ; works, 
value of, 115. 

Future tense, why wanting in some lan- 
guages, 314. 

G, pronunciation of, 492. 

Gallicisms in Old English, 112. 

Gender, grammatical, no relation to sex, 338. 

General propositions, liable to misinterpreta- 
tion, 76. 

Gen in overruled by printer, 418; on French 
pronunciation, 457. 

Gentleman, meaning and use of, 256, 612. 

German language, character and importance 
of, 13 ; borrows foreign words, 612 ; litera- 
ture, 207 ; philologists, superiority of, 12 ; 
services of to English, 11; purism, 206; 
scientific nomenclature, 205, 208 ; high, re- 
ligious dialect of all Germany, 623. 

Gibbon, style of, 447. 

Gill's phonographic system, 474. 

Globe, sphere, and orb compared, 575. 

God, used as verb by Sylvester, 304. 

Goethe, not linguist, 78 ; opinions of, on 
study of languages, 77 ; style of, 78, 448. 

Gooden, old verb, 316. 

Gothic languages, inflect by letter-change, 
562 ; early culture of, 131 ; derivation and 
composition in, 201; philological impor- 
tance of, 96 ; influence on Spanish, 141. 

Goths, Crimaean, 93. 

Gower, works of, 49. 

Grain, as a dye, etymology and history of, 
66. 

Grammar, want of in English, 88. 

Grammatical structure as test of linguistic 
affinity, 360. 

Greek language, etymology of, 80 ; modern, 
vocabulary of, 242 ; literature, value of, 95. 

Greeks, ancient, little grammatical training, 
4 ; no foreign philological training, 80 ; 
studied grammar before reading, 88, 412. 

Grundtvig, services of to Anglo-Saxon phi 
lology, 6. 

H, pronunciation of in English, 492, 674; in 
Latin, 493 ; disappearance of in Romance 
languages, 674. 

JIakluyt, value of, 114. 

Half-rhyme, 562. 

IlalliwelFs dictionary, 104. 

Hand, in etymology, 303. 

JIaveless, used by Gower, 135. 

He-bear and she-bear, clumsy forms, 204. 

Hengist and Horsa, names still common, 45. 

Heywod, T., verbal licenses of, 514. 

Heyse on language, 1. 

Hieroglyphics, Egyptian, number of, 182. 

Higden on study of English, 102. 

High, as verb, 316. 

Hit, masculine and neuter possessive, 395, 
397 ; sign of possessive case, 400, 



Holinshed's Chronicle, H2 
Home, English use of, al3. 
Hooker, works of, 113 ; his use of piurai ad 

jective, 312. 
Humanities, as designation of classical stu 

dies, 56. 
Humility, no word for in classic Greek, 226. 
Hunting and hawking, nomenclature of, 590. 

I, pronunciation of, 481. 

Icelandic language and literature, 94, 100; 
sagas, character of, 18 ; versification, 554. 

Idioms and idiotisms, distinguished, 606, 600 

Ignis fatuus translated by Fuller, 152. 

Imitative words, 36, 569. 

Immigrant, why American, 274. 

Improvisator!, Italian and Icelandic, 503, 561 

Income, use of, 279. 

Indexes, modern, 460. 

Infinitive past becoming obsolete, 317. 

Inflections, generally, Lectures XV., XVI., 
XVII., XVIII. 

Inflections, grammatical, origin of, 196, 335, 
338, 389 ; oflices of, 319 ; modes of, 331, 334: 
Latham on, 364 ; favor continuity of 
thought, 358 ; suited to poetical form, 372, 
499 ; influence pronunciation, 373, 512 ; 
structure of period, 354 ; of unwritten lan- 
guages, 366 ; of Latin, 325, 329, 341 ; of 
modern languages, 330, 337, 360, 365, 386 ; 
English, 385, 386. 

Inscriptions, dialect of, 422. 

Interjection, generally, Lecture XIII. 

Interjections, inherently expressive, 288. . 

Intonation in pronunciation, 284 ; in Chinese, 
Danish, and Swedish, 284. 

Inversion in syntax, 355. 

Irving, W., vocabulary of, 130. 

Italian language, 224. 

Its, possessive pronoun, origin of, 397. 

Johnson, Samuel on sufficiency of English, 

127 ; vocabulary of, 127. 
Jonson Ben, on language, 223 ; English 

grammar, 108 ; pronunciation, 484. 

Keats, diction of, 23. 

Knox, John, orthography of, 483. 

L, pronunciation of, 495. 

Language, origin of, Lecture II., 31, 38 ; as 
mental discipline, 216 ; of animals, 31 ; so- 
cial, not individual, faculty, 44, 297 ; local 
tenacity of, 25, 139. 

Language, relation of to character, 222, 224, 
227 ; foreign, study of, 76 ; native and 
foreign, comparison of, 98 ; how affected 
by foreign influence, 367 ; confusion of, in 
middle ages, 369 ; classification of, 192, 197 ; 
corruption of, Lecture XXIX. ; changes of, 
260,364; of Roman Empire, changes in, 
369 ; of superior race prevails, 140 ; revival 
of primitive forms in, 261, 363; modern, 
simplified in inflection, 360 ; first employ- 
ment of in literature, 371, 441; written and 
unwritten, 366, 389 ; violent, evil influence 
of, 234 ; how affected by emigration, 241. 

Latham on corruption of languages, 645. 

Latin, value of as grammatical discipline, 86, 
90, 347 ; character of, 90, 413 ; influence of, 
on Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, etc., 123, 131, 138 ; 
relations of to English, 138, 434 ; words and 
phrases in English, 151 ■ as language oi 
Papal church, 370 ■ extension of, 90, 139. 

Lautgeberden 289. 



714 



INDEX. 



Lavoisier, nomenclature of, 217. 
Libraries, extent of, 465. 
Line-rhyme in poetry, 554. 
Linguistics and philologv, 52. 
Luther's translation of Bible, 623. 

Make and maker, poetic use of, App. 61. 
Manufactures, domestic, vocabulary of, 269. 
Mate.iu kill, in To::ga islands, 38. 
hTfalj etymology and use of, 247. 
Mechanical art, nomenclature of, 184. 
Melancholy in II Penseroso, costume of, 66. 
Metaphrase, what, 614. 
Metaphysics, dialect of, 188. 
Metres, ancient in modern verse, 519, 520. 
Midst, in our, incorrect, 396, App. 54. 
Miller, Hugh, style of, 83. 
Milto.i, vocabulary of, 124, 128, 264. 
Modes, musical, of different languages, 285. 
Moeso-Gothic, importance of, 92. 
Montaigne, introduction of new words, 148. 
More, Sir Thomas, works of, 113, 124. 
Much people, in English Bible, 263. 
Mulcastcr, on English, 51. 
Muntaner, Ramon, quoted, 99, 370. 

Names, modern, Latinized, 346. 

Negative forms in Anglo-Saxon, 391. 

N e r i n g , used by Dutch for fishery, 251. 

N enter, gram, significance of, 338. 

New Testament, Greek, diction of, 227, 634. 

Newman's Homer, 520. 

Newspapers, literary character of, 442. 

N j a 1 a or Niall's Saga, 81. 

Norman-French, relation to English, 132, 384. 

Norway, dialects in, 133. 

" Nothing to Wear," diction of, 177. 

Noun, English, Lecture XIV., 301, 304, 305, 
310. 

Numbers used to indicate grammatical rela- 
tions, 342. 

Numerals, Anglo-Saxon, 154, App. 23. 

O, pronunciation of, 484. 

Of come, in early English, 279. 

Opera, Italian, vocabulary of, 182. 

Or, conjunction, equivocal, 587, App. 77. 

Order, logical, of words in period, 352,358. 

Ormulum, orthography of, 110, 424; metre 

of, 520, 524 ; vocabulary of, 110, 123. 
Orthography, Old-English, 21, 430. 
Ought and owe, etymology and use of, 320. 
Outcept and outtake, for except, 134. 
Outsider, introduction of, 274. 

pail and pale, distinguished in sound by 
Rask, 285. 

Paleario, English translation of, 104. 

Palsgrave, French grammar, character of, 
107. 

Paraphrase, as exercise, 614. 

Parker Society, publications of, 104. 

Participle, use of in English, 649, 656. 

Particles, Greek and German, 294 : insepar- 
able Anglo-Saxon and English, 197,203. 

Pascal, style of, 265, 448. 

Passive voice in Scandinavian languages, 
337 ; forms active in signification, 652. 

Pebersvend, pepper-boy. Danish for old 
bachelor, 251. 

Penny, as denomination of sizes of nails, 184. 

Periodicals, place of in philology, 441. 

Philology, modern, orgin of, 5 ; how distin- 
guished from linguistics, 52. 

Piers Ploughman, vocabulary of, 111, 124, 168. 



Pliny ti* jldcr, library of. 464. 

Poetry, conservative in language. 175, 372 
corruptions introduced by, 106, 112. 

Popular literature, >tyle of, 440. 

Portuguese words in English, 142. 

Position of words in period, 354 ; not con 
formed to order of thought, 352. 

Possessive case, old use of, 393; and plural 
sign, 108. 

Possessive pronoun as sign of case, 400, 401, 
402. 

Precision of language not promoted by in- 
flections, 351. 

Press, free, influence of on language, 436. 

Priesthood, English, ignorance of, 453. 

Printers, orthography of, 418. 

Printers, early English, ignorance of, 426, 428. 

Printing, influence of on language, Lectures 
XIX., XX., XXI. ; on pronunciation, 454, 
681 ; diffusion of knowledge, 446 ; extir- 
pates dialects, 681 ; relations of to Refor- 
mation, 432. 

Proclivity, old word revived, 278. 

Pronoun, personal, as sign of sex, 204, App 
33; possessive, see Possessive pronoun. 

Pronunciation, changes in, Lecture XXII. 
527 ; of Northern and Southern languages, 
373, 512, 671 ; in the United States, 669 ; of 
proper names, 454 ; of English and allied 
tonarues, 471 ; foreign, difficulty of, 283. 

Prosody, ancient, 516 ; English impaired by 
loss of inflections, 175, 539 ; of monosylla- 
bic languages, 533 ; of Gothic languages, 
533. 

Protestantism, no common dialect, 620. 

Punctuation, ures and effects of, 413. 

Purchas, Pilgrims, 115. 

Purism in language, 204. 

Purple, Tyrian, 69. 

Quantity in prosody, 516; and accent in 
Italian, 518. 

R, pronunciation of, 496, 673. 

Radical forms recovered in modern Ian 
guages, 364. 

Rask^services of, to Anglo-Saxon philology, 
6. 

Reading, general, influence of on language, 
446. 

Reckless, obsolescent in Hooker's time, 277. 

Reformation, relations of to English, 171, 
432, 443. 

Religious vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon, 199, 
231 ; among heathen, 228. 

Respect of, in, improper use of, 660. 

Respectable, changed in meaning, 256. 

Rhyme generally, Lectures XXIII., XXIV. 
origin of, 509 ; as guide to pronunciation 
472; why not used by ancients, 504; in 
English, 500, 510 ; Spanish and Italian, 502 
exhausted in English, 515, 535, 540, 570 
leads to introduction of foreign words, 538 
double, 526, 534, 535. 

Rhythm in verse, 543. 

Robert of Gloucester, vocabulary of, 123. 

Roman empire, extent of, 91. 

Ruskin, vocabulary and style of, 122, 127. 

Sailors, dialect of, 240. 
Salt, in chemistry, 211. 
Sanscrit, philological importance of, 96. 
Sarra, name of Tyre, 69. 
Sau dad e, Portuguese, similar word Id 
Scandinavian languages, 64. 



INDEX. 



715 



Saxons in England, 42. 

Scandinavian languages, importance of, 93 ; 
half-rhymes in, 562 ; changes in, 132,368; 
pronunciation of, 470. 471. 

Science, vocabulary of, 185, 187, 191, 207. 

Scott, Sir W., his character of Shaftou, 567. 

Severer, used by Mulcaeter for diairesis, 
J 53. 

Shakespeare, education of, 82; nationality 
of, 602 ; vocabulary of, 125, 264. 

Shall and will, use of, 659. 

Sidney, Sir P., his opinion of English, 88. 

Sight, for quantity or number, 181. 

Significance, natural, of articulate sounds, 
37. 

Signs and symbols, language of, 32. 

Sigurd, Bishop, Sermon of, 602. 

Since, sith, and sithence, 584. 

Skelton, works of, 23. 

Skothending in Icelandic poetry, 554. 

Sky-tinctured, in Milton, 70. 

Slide, let it, authority for phrase, 180. 

Smith, John, history of Virginia, 343, 416. 

Snorr'i Sturlswou, Ed da of, 103. 

Society, caprices of, affect language, 648. 

Svon, special meaning of, 580. 

Spanish, no influence on English, 142 ; ele- 
ments of, 141. 

Spenser's archaisms and licenses, 514 ; ver- 
sification, 540. 

Spindle-side, female line, 271. 

Stairs, pair of, proper expression, 184. 

8team-engine, vocabulary of, 147. 

Stereotyping, influence of, 465. 

-ster, termination in English, 306, App. 45. 

Swift, vocabulary of, 122. 

Sword-side, male line, 271. 

Synonyms, generally, Lecture XXVI. ; er- 
roneously defined by Webster, 571 ; in 
meaning differenced in use, 575 ; study of, 
592; Crabbe's, 595; edited by Whately, 
595. 

Syntax, English, 89, 95. 

Technical words and phrases, use of, 238, 
240. 

Telegram, new word, 280. 

th sound in Anglo-Saxon and Old-English, 
491, 496. 

Theological writers of 17th century, 115. 

Thucydides, style of, 80. 

Translation, difficulties of, 610, 612: helps 
and hindrances to, 597 ; principles of, 599, 
601 ; source of new words, 272, 616 ; uses 
of, 614. 

Translators, early English, 114. 

Travellers, old, importance of. 114. 

Trench, works of, 278. 

burner, on etymological proportions of Eng- 
lish, 119 



Tyndale's Ne\? Testament, literary merit* 
and importance of, 113, 171, 625. 

17, pronunciation of, 486. 

Ulphilas, translation of Scriptures, 92. 

-um, ending in, etymology of, 44, App. 4. 

Ungrayhair, used as verb by Fuller, 204, 

Uniter, used by Mulcaster for hyphen, 153. 

Un-, prefix, 204, 310. 

Use to, why not employed in present tense, 



Vague language, 232. 

Ventilate, old word revived, 278. 

Verb, generally, Lecture XIV. •; English, 
forms of, 314, App. 46 ; passive in Danish 
and Swedish, 337 ; not time-word, 299. 

Visible, as used by Milton, 135. 

Vocabulary, personal, 182, 616: as affected 
by subject, 129 ; of common life, 269 ; Eng- 
lish, 181 ; of different authors, 124. 

Volger's nomenclature of crystallography, 
214. 

"Volumes paramount," importance of, 18, 
264. 

Vowels, English long, diphthongal, 482. 

Vulgarization of words, 180. 

W, pronunciation of, 497. 

-ward or -icards, ending in, 431. 

Walton, education and style of, 83. 

Wesley, tried to revive nill, 391. 

Whately on gram, significance of gendor, 
338. 

Who and whose, use of, 397, App. 54. 

Wilde's imitative verse, 570. 

Wilt, to, 668. 

Winter, why used for year, 244. 

Woodwork's " Old Oaken Bucket," 373. 

Words, changes in meaning of, 242 ; abuses 
of, 258; coincidences of, 64; confounded 
by printers, 428 ; coalescence of, 337. 389 
decay and degradation of, 255, 258 ; dif- 
fusion of, 148 ; English, number of. 181 ; 
familiar, readily corrupted, 253 ; loss of, 
266 ; necessary to thought and memory, 1, 
2; natural significance of, 37; not equiva- 
lent in different languages, 596,611; new, 
how introduced, 183, 274 *, suspended ani- 
mation of, 179, 276, 277. 

Worsen, verb, 316. 

Worthen, verb, 316. 317. 

Wycliffe, dialect of, 167, 168, 625 ; influence 
of, 168. 

Y, participial prefix, 202, 333. 

Yea and yes, riayand no, hew distinguished, 

579. 
Year, Qu. g e - a r ? 246. 



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